Jesus in the 

Experience 

of Men 



T. R.Glover 




- 



GopyjightU a _ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSE 



JESUS IN THE 
EXPERIENCE OF MEN 



JESUS IN THE 
EXPERIENCE OF MEN 



JP 



1Y R. GLOVER 

Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, 
and Public Orator in the University. 
Author of "The Jesus of History" 




ASSOCIATION PRESS 

New York: 347 Madison Avenue 
1921 



Uj$ 



Copyright, 1921, by 
T. R. Glover 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



FEB 2 1 1921 



i 



Q 



INTRODUCTION 

One of the parables of Jesus turns on the ferment of 
leaven in a mass of meal — a vivid forecast of his own 
effect on the minds of men. He found a world full of 
established ideas, heirlooms of a great and progressive 
past, and the immediate effect of his coming was a 
struggle between inheritance and experience. "It was 
said to them of old time; but I say unto you." The 
minds of most of us are like palimpsests written over and 
over again; here the latest notion stands out in the new- 
est script, but between the letters are to be found traces 
of ideas much older, Obliterated but legible; there the 
old is almost untouched, but the closer observer finds hints 
of a "later hand." Every great thinker sets men re- 
writing these palimpsests, and it is long before it is com- 
pletely achieved; and often by that time a new story is 
being superimposed on the corrected page. Jesus had 
the same material to work upon as every great teacher, 
and his work was done in the same way, on the same 
terms, and with the same result in the clash of old and 
new. He has reacted on mankind, as we all know; he has 
transformed their ideas, blotted out old preconceptions 
and convictions, and through experience brought men to 
a new set of principles ; tout the process has been long and 
slow. 

It is not ls if men had really known at first what he 
meant and what his principles involved or, indeed, guessed 
how much his personality was to signify. It is easy to 
talk of his disciples taking the Christian message to the 
world; but when we begin to consider what this meant, 



vi INTRODUCTION 

the task which they undertook is progressively realized to 
be of the hardest. A man has an entirely new experience, 
and he wishes to tell other men of it, but in what lan- 
guage? If he uses their language, it is inadequate for 
the new light and joy he has found; if he uses his own, 
recreated by the experience, it will be unintelligible. 
The dilemma is real but not final. One mind goes out to 
meet another ; the listener can make nothing of the mes- 
sage, but he sees that there is something to be told; 
the bearing, the earnestness, the character of the mes- 
senger compel attention, and gradually the story is 
shared. But it is changed in being communicated. A 
poet has an inspiration; but if he is a great poet and 
writes great poetry, the eventual poem may be very 
different from the initial inspiration, even when it is 
full of it and expresses it — "like, but oh! how differ- 
ent!" The early Christian, in telling his story to the 
world, had to translate it ; and translation, as all bred on 
Greek verse composition know, is a discipline in under- 
standing; it means long and hard wrestling with the 
original, till it yields its real meaning. When the early 
Christian began to translate the story of Jesus into 
Greek (to say nothing of Latin, Syriac, or Armenian), 
he found out the gaps in his knowledge of the Greek 
vernacular and in his knowledge of Jesus; and by the 
time he had got his message into the new speech, his ex- 
perience of Jesus was a larger one, and he had to tell of a 
greater Christ than he had expected. The leaven had 
done more than it seemed to be doing. 

In one region and another of experience humanity has 
experimented with Jesus, constantly with new and un- 
expected results ; it has explored him with anxiety ; it has 
enjoyed him; and by exploring and enjoying him it has 
found more and more in him, and it has grown in the 
process. 



INTRODUCTION vii 

Our task in this volume is primarily historical. We 
have to watch the Christian apostle and the Christian 
community brought face to face with new issues, in- 
tellectual, spiritual, and social, and doing their best to 
adjust old and new, often with a belief in the perma- 
nence of the old which experience does not sustain, fre- 
quently with a good deal of fear which proves not war- 
ranted. The ancient world had had a long religious 
experience; and if some of its standard ideas were as 
yet insufficiently examined, some of its gains were real 
and permanent. The Christian Gospel had to be re- 
examined in connection with them all. 

The chief questions in religion for that ancient world 
were these: — Is God many or one? Is he just? 
Can man have peace with God and be sure of it? Is 
man's own personality secure, and for how long? We 
shall in turn have to discuss these questions and the 
older answers to them; to review the belief in spirits, 
that heirloom from animistic times, the philosophic 
foundation of polytheism; the problem of justice which 
haunts Greek thinkers from Theognis to Plato and be- 
yond, and is the inspiring motive of Jewish apocalyptic; 
the conception of religion as safety, and of sacrifice as 
the supreme mode of religion, the assurance of God's 
acceptance. As all these ideas had been perpetually 
readjusted to growing experience of the nature of 
morality, a fuller discussion of sin and its forgiveness 
will properly follow, and with it a survey of the central 
question of the nature of God, and then of the problem 
of personal immortality, which occupied antiquity more 
and more, and at every stage depended on the conception 
of God dominant in the day. Lastly in this connection 
we must consider the attempt made, upon the back- 
ground of these beliefs and of others, to explain the 
place of Christ in the universe which he was remodeling. 



viii INTRODUCTION 

The second part of the book will deal more directly 
with the Christian society. There we shall have to re- 
view the efforts of the Church as it wrestles with its 
own problems of existence and effectiveness, as an insti- 
tution. The personal relations which its members 
generally maintained with their Founder have been at 
every period decisive for the character of the Church at 
large; and we must make some endeavor to determine 
these relations, particularly when and where they are 
most intense and most controlling. 

Finally, there are the broader effects of the ideas of 
Jesus upon human progress and the human spirit at 
large — sometimes the result of conscious and deliberate 
application of his principles to the affairs of men, per- 
haps as often the unconscious and unrecognized but 
none the less real outcome of men's affection for him. 

Of course, as Aristotle said of his own Ethics, all this 
will be attempted "in outline and not in detail." A 
further difficulty will be that in all such study we have 
to isolate and to analyze ideas which were operative to- 
gether and acted and reacted on one another; but that 
also is inevitable unless the reader will tolerate some 
repetition among the chapters. Finally, writer and 
reader here will have different roles ; the writer is to be 
the historian merely ; it is for the reader to pass upon the 
evidence submitted and to be the theologian. In any 
case the work, if properly done by both writer and 
reader, should result in a new sense of the significance 
of Jesus in the experience of men. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Introduction v 

I. The War with the Daemons 1 

II. The Problem of Divine Justice 18 

III. Saviours and Salvation 35 

IV. The Lamb of God 52 

V. The Forgiveness of Sin 71 

VI. The Revelation of God 92 

VII. Immortality 113 

VIII. Alpha and Omega 132 

IX. The Church Compromising 147 

X. The Lordship of Jesus 169 

XI. The Frdendship of Jesus 182 

XII. The Church Triumphant 196 

XIII. The Humanizing of Life 211 

XIV. The Reconciliation of Freedom and Re- 
ligion 231 



IX 



CHAPTER I 
THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 



A chance phrase will sometimes open a man's mind to 
us and show us a series of thoughts and ideas, of precon- 
ceptions and presuppositions, which surprise us. We 
have known him, intimately, too ; and behind all lay this ! 
It is with some such feeling that we find a whole world 
of strange background to the familiar thinking of St. 
,P aul. He speaks of the wisdom of God, and then he 
adds, "which none of the princes of this world knew; 
for, had they known it, they would not have crucified 
the Lord of Glory" (I Cor. 2:8). It was not of Pontius 
Pilate and Herod that Paul was speaking, but of beings 
far more awful and far more powerful — thrones, domin- 
ions, principalities and powers, as he calls them else- 
where, "the world-rulers of this darkness," and at their 
head is "the prince of the power of the air." 1 

There had grown up in Jewish thought a great 
scheme of things which embodied a spirit world at war 
with God. Satan appears in the Old Testament, first of 
all as an accuser, and then as a maker of mischief. In 
the period between the main body of the Old Testament 
and the beginnings of the New, he had gained a greater 
prominence in men's thoughts and was now lord of the 
angels that fell, the great enemy of God, 2 "the Black 



1 See II Cor. 4:4; Eph. 3:2; Eph. 6:12; Col. 2:30; Gal. 4:3, 9. For princi- 
palities and powers and thrones, cf. II Enoch (Secrets) 20:1. 

2 Cf. Testament of Dan 5, "For I read in a book of Enoch the just, that 
the ruler of them is Satan." Cf. II Enoch (Secrets) 18:3. In I Enoch 
65:6, the Satans appear in the plural. 



2 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

One" 8 . God, with his purposes, and the forces that stand 
with him, is confronted by powers of evil, not scattered 
and desultory, but organized, ruled, and guided, well 
drilled, well led, and not unaware of God's designs. 
Again and again, through traitors in God's Kingdom, 
they got wind of the plans of God* and anticipated them, 
defeated them where they could, and fought a war of 
cunning and skill against God. 6 

The Jews did not stand alone in this conception of the 
spirit world. For the primitive peoples of today and for 
some who are not so primitive, the whole universe is full 
of daemon powers, more real than we can imagine. In an 
Indian temple I have seen women undergoing the process 
of having devils driven out of them. I have seen men 
of education bowing in these temples to avert the anger 
of such spirits. To the stranger from the West, with 
his modern science, they are nothing. To the ancient 
world they were more real than the men and women in 
the streets. All the daemons, devils, imps, and bogeys of 
popular belief, and all the gods of all the cults and all the 
religions were being reduced to one system; all were 
necessary in an orderly Cosmos. The later Greek 
philosophers explained through daemons the origin of 
evil, all the mystery and all the trouble of the world ; and 
also the otherwise inexplicable gulf between the ultimate 
but unknowable One God and man. Gods lived beyond 
the atmosphere; daemons in the air; man on earth. So 
there was this daemon world proven; proven by all sick- 
ness and sin ; proven by long belief, by the old religions ; 
proven by the agreement of all mankind; proven by the 
assent of the best and most catholic of philosophic 



3 Barnabas 4:11. 

4 Cf . Enoch 16:3; not all the mysteries were known to the Watchers 
who fell. 

5 Cf . H. A. A. Kennedy, St. Paul and the Mystery Religions, p. 121; 
St. Paul and the Last Things, pp. 324, 325; Clemen, Primitive Christianity 
and Non-Jewish Sources, pp. 83, 110. 



THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 3 

thinkers. The Jew and the Christian were monotheists, 
but they too believed in the existence of daemons; they 
were face to face with this awful reality of the daemon 
world at war with God. Paul, it is quite clear, shared 
that belief, though he did not give to it the importance 
that other men gave. 

Into that war, however, according to Paul, came a new 
force — the son of God, the Lord of Glory. 8 He battled 
with the powers of evil, and the battle went strangely, 
and they trapped him. Pilate and Herod were mere 
tools in the hands of these daemon powers, and they cap- 
tured the Son of God. They crucified the Lord of Glory, 
and inflicted on God the most awful disaster that could 
be conceived. Then it turned out, says Paul, that, so 
far from defeating God's purposes, with all their skill 
and all their cunning, they had only played into the 
hands of God. For the defeat of Christ on the cross led 
to the Resurrection, to the triumph of God over the 
daemon powers, to captor made captive, death conquered, 
mankind set free; and all the glorious promises of 
spiritual liberty and of peace with God which the Chris- 
tian world knows, and in which it rejoices. 

In Paradise Lost we have this story in its most glori- 
ous form, but few of us accept it as history. All this 
dim world has passed from our minds ; this tale of war in 
the spirit sphere is for us the merest mythology — "as 
much a dream as Milton's hierarchies," wrote John Keats. 7 
Yet for St. Paul's contemporaries the permanence of the 
daemons was better assured than that of the Lord of 
Glory; their part and place in the world was proved and 
accepted, his was a doubtful Jewish assertion. 8 



6 The Lord of Glory is a name of God in I Enoch. 

7 Keats, Letter to Reynolds, August 25, 1819. 

8 Celsus, about a.d. 178, ridiculed this war of Satan with God; it was 
not "holy" to suggest that the greatest God had a rival; it was all a mis- 
understanding (quite in the Christian style) of Heraclitus' doctrine of 
strife. Celsus, however, accepted belief in daemons as natural and right. 



4 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

Two problems here confront the historian. He has to 
explain how this phantasmagoria disappeared, and why, 
if this legend of war was the real Christian faith, or 
some vital part of it, the Lord of Glory has not gone 
with the rest of the dramatis personae. The identifica- 
tion of the Lord of Glory with the carpenter of Nazareth 
was surely the keystone of the Christian faith. If the 
one is dismissed as a figure in a fairy tale, what signifi- 
cance is left to the other? If we abandon Paul's 
"mythology" or turn it into "symbol," which is a politer 
way of doing the same thing, do we not, by this process 
of discarding, rob the Christian tradition and the 
Christian faith of its distinctive note and its real value? 

If the affirmation of the writer to the Hebrews is to 
stand, "Jesus Christ, yesterday and today the same, and 
forever" ; if the Church is to maintain that he has any 
permanence; we shall have to show what has been his 
real place in human experience, and to prove that the 
teaching of the Church about its Master rests not on 
abstract theory or mythology, but has foundations in 
what men have actually experienced of him. We shall 
have to treat such evidence as the Christian generations 
give us, exactly as we do all historical evidence — with 
the same sympathy, with the same caution, applying the 
same canons of judgment, using the same habits of 
doubt, looking in the same spirit of truthfulness for 
alternative explanations, careful always to limit our 
statements severely by our real knowledge. 

The modern psychologist has, we may say, settled a 
great many questions suggested by the demonology of 
the past. He treats visions and voices, dual personality, 
conversion, and so forth, in a way foreign altogether to 
Paul's contemporaries, as to modern Roman Catholic, to 
Hindu and animist; and his conclusions so far appeal to 
the best trained minds as more satisfactory than the 



THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 5 

ancient explanations. Will he go further and dispose of 
our religious experience as he has done of the long- 
established belief in daemons, in visions and theophanies ? 
After all, the worst he can really do is to drive us to a 
closer study of fact, and our best friends can do us no 
better service. If he has disposed of the daemons and 
demigods, by whom the ancient thinker used to explain 
the existence of evil in the world, he has achieved a great 
stroke for mankind, it is true, in ridding men of the 
most paralyzing terrors it has known ; but he has neither 
eliminated evil from the world we know, nor explained 
its presence there. A great dissension in Nature re- 
mains, however we express it or explain it. Carlyle used 
to worry over Emerson's inability to see the hand of the 
devil in human life. We know Carlyle's vocabulary and 
we interpret it; is not (in passing) the same procedure 
fair in reading the New Testament and the Christian 
Fathers? What lies behind their vocabulary? What 
facts of experience do their psychology and their demon- 
ology indicate? An explanation implies an experience. 
Pain is no less uncomfortable physically if we refuse the 
view that a daemon causes it, though, of course, a 
bacillus may perhaps be more easily treated. There re- 
mains just as much reality as before about the historical 
Jesus, and about the living and present Christ, whether 
we accept or reject the theories which the Church has 
spun on the subject ; and the same applies to the theories 
of the Church's critics. Let us get to history. 



II 



After quoting the evidence of St. Paul for the wide- 
spread belief in daemons, it may seem a contradiction to 
suggest that in the New Testament the daemons are 
already beginning to recede from the first line of 



6 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

interest ; yet it is true. The writers of the Gospels refer 
all sorts of diseases to daemon-possession, as their con- 
temporaries did. They stood with their neighbors in 
psychology, as was natural, and they shared their opin- 
ions in medicine. But while they keep the old language 
and the old beliefs, they are in possession of a principle 
which makes these of less consequence. For them the 
daemons and gods of polytheism are no longer very 
interesting. This is doubly clear. Paul puts it quite 
explicitly that they are defeated and are "coming to 
naught"; and the chief interest of the early Christian 
was manifestly in Jesus. The pagan gods were quickly 
disposed of; they were the angels that fell — mere 
daemons like the rest. But it was a longer time before 
the daemons, and their milder but legitimate descend- 
ants, the fairies, were definitely expelled for ever from 
the sphere of existence; but it was achieved, and by the 
New Testament principle of concentrating emphasis on 
Jesus Christ. 

Thus Tatian, in the second century, proclaims with joy 
that "instead of daemons that deceive we have learnt 
one Master who deceiveth not." A modern Japanese, 
Uchimura, struck the same note; it was joyful news, 
"one God and not eight million." Tatian found it an 
attraction in Christianity that it is "monarchic" and 
"sets man free from ten thousand tyrants." Modern 
scholars are only beginning to realize the burden laid on 
the human mind by astrology and kindred impostures 
that came from the East, and with a jargon of phil- 
osophy and religion imposed themselves on the Roman 
world. Tatian knew it well enough and renounced the 
Greeks and their philosophy. Philosophy had, in fact, 
by its surrender to polytheism and popular belief in 
daemons, strengthened their hold on men. The Gospel 



9 See Tatian, cc. 9, 16, 17. 



THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 7 

did not in so many words deny their existence, but first 
degraded them and broke their hold, and at last anni- 
hilated them. By so doing it took terror out of men's 
souls, it made obscene and cruel rites needless, and 
greatly purified and sweetened life. 

It is, however, important to note that there was a 
struggle. The Gospel could be made infinitely more 
palatable to many minds by bringing it into line with 
other religions, by blending with it religious and philo- 
sophical principles on which they rested, but which were 
vitally opposed to Christian history and Christian ideals. 
Such combinations appeared to clear up real philosoph- 
ical difficulties and left men in a congenial atmosphere of 
magic and daemonic agencies. It does an historian's 
heart good to see the swinging blows with which 
Ignatius hammers a contemporary theory (c. A. D. 110) 
that made Jesus into a "daemon without a body." It is 
worth remembering that the Church always held to the 
real humanity of Christ; it was left for the heresies to 
spin endless genealogies of figments, metaphors, essences, 
and daemons. To some minds fancy always seems more 
able than truth to fire the imagination. Today it is hard 
for the Western thinker to make anything at all of the 
fragments of Gnostic theology and demonology that have 
come down to us, or to understand how anybody could 
ever have been interested in them. This is in itself an 
indication of what the absorbing interest in Jesus has 
done; and when one grasps that it stands between us 
and systems like the many forms of modern Hinduism 
and theosophy, one realizes anew the value of the his- 
torical Jesus. 

At times it might seem as if the early Christian, like 
converts from heathenism today, really used the Gospel 
as a sort of super-magic. He employed "the Name that 
is above every name" to expel devils; and from an ex- 



8 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

perience of my own in India I can understand why he 
did. 10 But that was by the way. What made that name 
of value was the Man who bore it, and the supreme inter- 
est of his character and story, his cross and resurrection, 
and yet more his teaching upon God and the intimate 
relation with God which was at last the only way of ex- 
plaining him. If Jesus embodied God, if "God was in 
Christ reconciling the world unto himself," if God was 
essentially like Jesus, then obviously, however real they 
might be, the daemons were irrelevant. As the daemon- 
world was at best a theory to explain phenomena possibly 
susceptible of other explanations, when Jesus made it 
irrelevant it ceased to be of interest and it died. This 
is shortening the story but not changing its meaning. 
If throughout the Middle Ages and even after the Refor- 
mation men believed in daemons and witches, as they 
did, the liberation of the human mind, which, as we 
shall see in a later chapter, belongs to the work of Christ, 
steadily drove the superstition into the background 
where it gradually died. Jesus is allied with the powers 
of the mind, and his Gospel naturally militates against 
"imaginations and every high thing that thrusts itself 
up," as Paul said. 

Ill 

That Jesus was historical differentiates him at once 
from the daemon "Rulers of the World" and their hosts. 
They were creatures of the fancy; and he was, in our 
ordinary sense of the word, real. They depended on a 
theory or a series of theories, and their dispositions and 
natures, when they had any, were mere matters of legend 
and fairy tale; but there was nothing authoritative, 



10 The most splendid illustration of this is the "Breastplate of Patrick," 
which in Mrs. Alexander's verse is in the English Hymnal. The original 
and a prose translation are in Whitley Stokes's Tripartite Life of St. Pat- 
rick, Vol. I, p. 49. 



THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 9 

nothing final, about them. Indeed there was nothing to 
begin on, such as a real person offers. A character guar- 
anteed by history is something definite to work upon, 
however multiple it may be. It is possible to spend one- 
self with profit in the study of a real man; but if a 
daemon or a fairy has any lineaments at all, they are 
borrowed; and the peacock's feathers are more interest- 
ing on the peacock than on the jackdaw, especially when 
the jackdaw itself is a fable. 

It was, as we have seen, an immense gain that Jesus 
was objective, that one could say of him, "This befel him 
and that definitely did not." The value of this will be 
brought out by even a very short investigation of 
Plutarch's method of handling legend or a little talk 
with a Hindu defending Hinduism. On the one side 
there is nothing but a series of dissolving views; with 
Jesus you are on the rock at once and have positive 
knowledge. To the troubled in heart it was intense 
relief to turn to a real figure with a real experience and 
no "perhaps" underlying all. But he is more than his- 
torically real; he is real in a deeper sense. 

The first three gospels give records of a peculiar inti- 
macy about his life, his character, his mind and person- 
ality. They yield a surprising amount of detail, vivid, 
various, and true. He can be known well, for while his 
sayings are often perplexing and stimulating, as he 
meant them to be, his meaning, his general drift, his 
fundamental ideas are extraordinarily clear. He has a 
reality, an intensity, that makes other men look beg- 
garly in their outfit, starved in nature and parochial. 

Here is a man of genius going quite beyond everyone 
else we know of that kind; a man of wide range in ex- 
perience, of intuition, of acumen and instincf. He knows 
what his experience means and he does not miss it. He 
sees and feels things with an intensity that we do not 



10 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

reach. It is of this type that our greatest teachers are 
in every sphere. The tourist, for instance, sees a water- 
fall, a rock so many feet high with water coming over; 
he looks at it, and then takes a newspaper from his 
pocket till it is time to go home. Wordsworth sees more 
and realizes he is face to face with a great storehouse 
of experience: 

"The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion." 

The sound of it rang in his ears; the sight of it stayed 
with him, the color, the gleam, the beauty ; he knew they 
would, and was (so to speak) too busy to waste any- 
thing in momentary enjoyment. Jesus, we can guess, 
felt Nature — experienced Nature — in a way very similar. 
Men miss a great deal of their experience; but he is 
clearer-headed than we are. He sees things, grasps 
things and realizes them. To take a crucial case, already 
referred to, he realized pain. When men drew the great 
spiritual teachers of that day, they left out any sugges- 
tion of their being amenable to pain when they could, 
and made them impassive. Jesus' followers drew him on 
the cross. Men have always felt, as they got into touch 
with Jesus, that here is a man who knows where the 
problems hurt. Why does the widow lose her son? He 
had lived with a widow and her children, and worked for 
her day in and day out, and from her he learnt a tender- 
ness for all women and all widows. What is the mean- 
ing of that pain? Or the pain of a prodigal son? That, 
too, he has drawn in his parables. He felt it and he 
knew it. The problem bore on him and burdened him 
and took him to the cross. What, again, is the meaning 
of the devilish hardness of the human heart? What in- 
deed? Four years of war have revealed ugly streaks in 
us ; we fancied they were not there ; but he knew. Here, 



THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 11 

then, was a man who had been bruised and agonized by the 
problems that trouble us. He had to wrestle with these 
things. He would have no anodyne. He drank the cup 
without the anesthetic. He went through it all till he 
knew the points that trouble men and women. He knew 
exactly where the difficulty comes; and he has found 
peace. Matthew Arnold wrote a good deal of theology 
which is obsolete, but there are certain things which he 
wrote which rise higher than much modern criticism. 
"Jesus Christ," he said, "was above his reporters"; but 
he said a greater thing still. "Jesus bases himself 
always on experience, and never on theory"; and that is 
a great truth. 

Genius differs from our common endowment perhaps 
most in this that it seizes the fact with meaning; and, 
that once achieved, all the rest fall into lucidity. For 
Jesus experience was not sheer sickening pain, for he 
understood what to do with it. He penetrated farther 
into it than we do. This again is the mark of the genius, 
of the poet. Jesus had a hold of the centrality of God 
in experience in a way that still surprises us. Call it 
genius, insight, intuition — or use the speech of the 
Church and say Word, Essence, Homoousios — the fact 
we are all trying to express is the intense hold that 
Jesus has of the Real ; he knows, where others are guess- 
ing, and guessing badly." 

Our age is not the first to discover the value to ordi- 
nary people of a great man. The names of Socrates and 
Zeno haunt the discourses of that day. They and not 
the daemons were the moral examples, a significant fact. 
"Place before yourself what Socrates or Zeno would have 
done in such circumstances," said Epictetus." "Though 
you are not yet a Socrates, you ought to live as one w T ho 



"See p. 110. 
12 Manual, 33. 



12 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

wishes to be a Socrates." 13 "Go away to Socrates and see 
him . . . and think what a victory he felt he won over 
himself." 1 * Others gave similar advice; "Do everything 
as if Epictetus saw." 16 And among Romans Cato and 
Laelius were recommended. "We ought to choose some 
good man," writes Seneca, "and always have him before 
our eyes that we may live as if he watched us, and do 
everything as if he saw." 19 So old and so natural is the 
use men make of other men who have been victorious in 
life ; so much more profitable is history than theory. 

The great man is felt not to be an accident, or (to 
use a biological term) a "sport," but to be a real and 
relevant manifestation of what human nature is. What 
is possible for one can be possible under conditions for 
another; and then the question rises about the condi- 
tions, a question difficult enough but soluble somehow, 
men feel. And man, by nature built to be moral and to 
be religious, built to seek for truth, is driven by his 
experience of the "great Man" to look more deeply into 
human nature and into its relations with the spiritual 
environment, with God. In epitome, all real progress 
in religion has been achieved by men who would face 
the facts and divined which facts to face; by men who 
realized that victory in the sphere of mind and char- 
acter is the best evidence as to ultimate reality; or, 
simply, by men who had good fathers and friends and 
knew it, and put them definitely above doubtfully moral 
gods and daemons, and slowly rethought their ideas 
of God and rebuilt their religious systems on the im- 
pulse of their experience of human goodness." It is not 
necessary here, nor possible, to survey through nineteen 



18 Manual, 50. 
14 Discourses, II, 18, 22. 
"Seneca, Ep. 25:5. 
™Ep. 11:8. 

17 The last clause epitomizes a good deal of the progress in religion 
made by Greece before Plato. 



THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 13 

centuries how men s experience of Jesus has driven them 
into fresh thought on God and man. But to realize how 
far ahead of religions based on daemon-theories and 
old legends Christianity is, some close study in detail 
of its records and its contrasts is invaluable. 

To recapitulate, before we pass on, the victory of 
Jesus has only been slowly won. Tradition, association, 
esthetics, sheer conservatism, and terror have all played 
their part in retarding it. There must be daemons, men 
felt, or all the world would not say so ; what "everybody" 
says, must be true — paraphrasing Stoic doctrine of the 
consensus of mankind. But experience of Jesus was a 
great corrective. He was very difficult to explain; the 
reconciliation of what he said with the teaching of priest 
and philosopher and gossip was very hard; but in the 
end fact conquers. There he was, historical, true, intel- 
ligent of his experience, a pioneer in fact and an inter- 
preter; and there he is still. 

IV 

It is difficult to recall an instance of a great person- 
ality putting a new truth before the world and passing 
away from the life of mankind before the new lesson 
was learnt to the very end and transcended. The prophets 
pass away; the commentators pass, and the doctors — 
these last two very quickly. The poets stand far better, 
for they take us farther into reality; Jesus best of all, 
for he reaches the greatest depths in all he feels and 
says. We have not yet exhausted what he has to say; at 
times it seems as if we had hardly begun to explore it. 
In two ways we realize how far ahead he is of us. When- 
ever the Church returns to him and begins to take him 
seriously, there is always a resurrection, evidence of a 
new life; and this could not be if his value were spent. 



14 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

And, further — for the Church does not always lead the. 
intelligence of mankind — when new light reaches' the 
Church from without, again and again it proves that 
the new science, or the new scholarship, the new politics 
or the new psychology, that seemed "dangerous" to the 
Gospel of Christ, is not inimical in the least, has nothing 
about it that we could think alien to the spirit of the 
Jesus of history. Four years of war have taught us 
much evil, but they have at least revealed that Jesus' 
conception of man was truer than those estimates com- 
monly framed by politicians, emperors, war offices, and 
journalists. No political society has yet attempted to 
organize itself on the basis of the belief that Jesus can 
be unreservedly right in his view of man. Our economics 
and our nationalism make Jesus inevitable; there is no 
getting rid of him till we have transcended him. The 
war again raised in millions of homes the question that 
Jesus settled. The New Testament speaks of him abolish- 
ing death and bringing life and immortality to light 
(II Tim. 1:10); it suggests that the sting of death is 
gone, that the tragedy is all resolved in quiet and content 
by his cross and his resurrection. The gulf between 
such a view and the sorrow we know in every land of 
Europe today measures the distance between us and the 
disappearance of Jesus. 

But if Jesus is still a great correction to our thought 
about men, still more is he to our thought about God. 
If a man were to make the experiment for a week, never 
in reading, in thought or in speech, to let the name of 
God pass without trying to put into it the full meaning 
that Jesus gives it, the staggering task would -bring 
home to him how far Jesus is from being superseded, 
how far we are from having exhausted the value of his 
message about God. Jesus again will remain till we 
have worked out the full value and meaning of what 



THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 15 

he thinks about ourselves in conjunction with God — a 
rather different thing from either taken separately. So 
far as I understand the times in which we live, religion 
is only possible to the modern man along the lines of 
Jesus Christ. For the really educated man of today there 
are no other religions. There are people who play at 
being Buddhists and Hindus; and we may wonder what 
the reflective Buddhist and the reflective Hindu think 
about them. All sorts of poses are adopted by men and 
women, but serious thinkers do not pose; and any man, 
who comes to grips with history and philosophy, knows 
that Buddha and Muhammad and the thinkers of Hindu- 
ism are not for us. It is Jesus or nobody, and we are 
still far from grasping the whole significance of what 
he has to say. God for Jesus, God in Jesus, is an un- 
explored treasure still; and for us, apart from Jesus, 
God is little better than an abstract noun; and to people 
who are serious, abstract nouns are of less and less use. 
Let us put it this way. If we spoke straight out, we 
should say that God could not do better than follow the 
example of Jesus. That means that Jesus fulfils our con- 
ception of God ; 18 but that is not all, nor is it enough. He 
is constantly enlarging our idea of God, revealing great 
tracts of God unsuspected by us. God as interpretable 
in and through Jesus is unexhausted. Here lies the ex- 
planation of the new life that the Church always shows, 
when it returns to the historical Jesus and takes him seri- 
ously. It involves his remaining; and his historicity is 
once more our foundation. 

So far we have been dealing with the part played by 
Jesus in shaping and clearing thought. But thought is 
tested in life and conduct. There are about us hundreds 
of men and women who have found that in the business 
of keeping level with life, in the more desperate business 



18 This point will be taken up in the next chapter. 



16 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

of fighting one's character through to something like 
decency, Jesus is still a dependable factor. We are not 
dealing with propositions in the air ; we are dealing with 
Someone, they tell us, to whom we can go and say, "Come 
and help me," and he does. If some psychologists will 
not quite let us say that, they must concede that we find 
help when we bring him in. It is not clear that the psy- 
chologists are at the end of their discoveries, and their 
disciples often quote them too soon and with too dogmatic 
a tone; there are still facts about suggestion to be dis- 
covered and to be weighed ; and when psychology has said 
its last about the facts, it is philosophy that has to bring 
in the verdict on the facts. In the meantime it is the 
experience of countless souls that where we touch Jesus 
we do somehow touch the real. Do we not know men and 
women who have been remade by Jesus Christ? In our 
own lives, too, we know the help that Jesus has been 
and is. It is our experience that we can depend upon 
him, that we can utilize him ; and our experience is guar- 
anteed in measure by the similar experience of others. 
Even if this form of expression needs correction, and 
granting that our experience, even when so confirmed, 
needs examination, we have here a strong presumption 
of evidence; we are justified in thinking that truth awaits 
us in this direction. If we find help in Jesus it seems 
reasonable to maintain that Jesus has not passed away, 
and to attribute some large part of his effect to his being 
a real historical personality, neither a legend nor a dogma, 
but a man. 

If he has not passed away, he remains the concern of 
all who take life seriously. We shall never understand 
the last nineteen centuries, if he and his influence are 
unfamiliar or unintelligible to us. We shall not have 
our full equipment for facing the future if so great a 
Force, intelligible, available and unexhausted, is left by 



THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 17 

us on one side. The progress of the Christian life is 
marked and measured at every stage by increasing de- 
pendence on Jesus ; Christian and non-Christian, we have 
to explain this fact in life. We have to understand Jesus 
Christ, unless our universe is to be chaos. 



CHAPTER II 
THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 

All through Christian history we find an emphasis on 
the judgment seat of Christ, an inspiration at once of 
terror and of hope, but so far at least, an integral part 
of the Christian scheme of things. To the historian it 
is plain that the picture of this judgment seat, the "great 
white Throne," owes features to older story; and certain 
reflections at once occur. Has the judgment seat a legiti- 
mate place in Christian thought, or is it a survival of 
pre-Christian tradition and alien? In other words, is it 
a matter of inheritance or does it rest on some real ex- 
perience? And again, if experience has been used to 
point to such a conclusion of human history, is this the 
sole and necessary inference of the experience, or is an- 
other alternative possible? Assuming a "last judgment" 
of some sort, what relevance or relation can the historical 
carpenter of Nazareth have to it? For it is at least a 
remarkable thing that when Christians borrowed from 
Jews the idea of a Judgment Day, and developed it along 
the lines of the Greek philosophic myths, they transferred 
the supreme place to Jesus. 

To understand the central idea of a Great Assize, 
whether Jewish, Platonic, or Christian, it is well to ex- 
amine the experience which led men to venture such a 
hypothesis. It must be borne in mind that it is not so 
much folklore as philosophy that underlies the doctrine, 
an attempt to justify the ways of God to men. As the 

18 



THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 19 

data in the problem are common, we shall take them as 
the Christian had them presented to him. 



There are two judgment seats in the New Testament — 
Pilate's (Matt. 27:19) and Christ's (II Cor. 5:10)— and 
whatever uncertainty there be about the judgment seat 
of Christ, there is no mystery, no wonder, no perhaps, 
about the judgment seat of Pilate; we are touching fact 
there. The story is familiar. The priests have got their 
man. One of his followers went back on him and sold 
him — a thing that has often happened in the East, and 
is not unknown in the West. They took him to Pilate 
with an accusation and some sort of evidence. Pilate 
was no Roman of the old school ; he did not hold with all 
the ancient traditions of self-rule and principle; but he 
was shrewd and clever, and he saw through the situation. 
He knew the priests very well ; he had also heard a little 
of the man perhaps — one of those tiresome "kings of the 
Jews"; but a glance at the man told him at once that 
there was nothing of importance this time. There is no 
case; but these people are not in a pleasant mood; and 
his record is not strong enough to leave him quite inde- 
pendent. So the question rises : What is to be done with 
this poor creature? 

It is a festival, at which the tradition is that a prisoner 
shall be released; and there is a notable prisoner in his 
hands, a man whom they all know. Barabbas, we are 
told, had made an insurrection, and in the course of it 
there had been murder. The Fourth Gospel says he was 
a brigand. In the nineteenth century there were men 
in Greece whom the Turks called brigands, but the Greeks 
counted them patriots; the difference was merely in the 
point of view. The Greek people loved them and made 



20 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

ballads about them, till the name klepht (thief, in old 
Greek) became romantic. Bar abbas was probably of this 
type. He had defied the law. Yes, but foreigners had 
made the law. He had given trouble to the Government, 
and the persons killed very likely were Roman soldiers. 

According to one gospel (Matthew's) Pilate offers the 
crowd the choice of Jesus or Barabbas. The others give 
another account of how the alternative was presented. 
The talk in the crowd must have been ebb and flow, 
somehow so. There are no real grounds, says one man, 
for Jesus being put to death. No, but we are in such 
a position, that if we free Jesus we kill the patriot. 
Some people had thought that Jesus might be the Mes- 
siah, but he is a hopeless failure. There is no reason 
why Jesus should not be released on the merits of the 
case, and Barabbas in accordance with custom. Jesus or 
Barabbas? Well, we cannot give away Barabbas. But, 
after all, it is not really we who condemn either Jesus 
or Barabbas to death; we would release both. The re- 
sponsibility rests with the man who has fastened the 
alternative upon us, or it is inherent in the situation. 
All we have to do is to decide who has served our people 
best. One man calls out for Barabbas, and then every- 
body shouts "Barabbas!" "And what about Jesus?" 
There are people at work among the crowd representing 
the priests, and the cry goes up: "Crucify him!" The 
only chance to get Barabbas is to have Jesus crucifiecj. 
So the cry comes with more volume, and Pilate gives 
them Barabbas; and that is the end of Jesus called 
Messiah. 1 

Jesus was condemned because he was unpopular. He 
had had a chance of popularity and had missed it. He 



1 "Pilate," says a clever Irishman, "was the prototype of all English 
officials, with his condescending yet contemptuous manner to natives, his 
tolerant scorn of their beliefs, and his occasional feeble generosity toward 
patriots or prophets." Shane Leslie, The End of a Chapter, p. 160. 



THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 21 

was unpatriotic. "Render unto Caesar," he said, "the 
things that are Caesar's." A very clever answer! But 
on the straight issue of Rome or Israel he had floundered. 
Barabbas had been definitely patriotic. The teaching of 
Jesus was unpractical. It was not going to lighten the 
burden of Roman oppression. It was very pretty for an 
ideal world, for Utopia, as we say; for Plato's Republic, 
as they used to say; very beautiful. But we live in a 
real world; and Jesus was unpractical. Unpopular, un- 
patriotic, unpractical, unintelligible — it is a heavy indict- 
ment, and the periods in history have been few when it 
would not carry condemnation with it. 

The suffering of the innocent is no strange thing; 
what would war be without it? A certain percentage 
of miscarriages is always to be expected of justice. 
Again and again in history we see a general collapse of 
conscience in government or people, under the influence 
of fear of some foreign enemy, or for want of the habit 
of facing new ideas in politics or economics, or even in 
religion. History is full of such horrors. Nor is it only 
the past that knows them. 

II 

After all, the condemnation of Jesus raises the com- 
mon issue of injustice and wrong. It is the crucial case. 
So the question rises, Is the thing going to stay there 
or is it not? Is the judgment seat of Pilate the last 
word? Our instinct, the instinct of all men, is that 
what is wrong cannot be left wrong; it must be set right 
somehow. Men have felt there must be a court of appeal 
that will put it right. 

God's ways, of course, are inscrutable. Children die, 
and ships are wrecked; the plain laws of Nature work 
out in pain and perplexity ; but there is something worse, 



22 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

far worse, which has to be explained in God's manage- 
ment of the universe. The most tragic thing of all is 
man's failure to achieve justice. All society is an en- 
deavor toward justice, from the first dawn of history, 
from the earliest appeal to chief or king for an award 
between tribesman and tribesman, from the day when 
the people called for the first publication of laws, down 
through all the codes — codes of Moses, of Manu, of 
Justinian — Magna Charta, Habeas Corpus; has not jus- 
tice been the common life-nerve of every revolution? 
Does it not underlie all the great movements? And yet, 
after all these centuries of pain and tragedy, man does 
not recognize justice; and even where he does, a whiff 
of terror or passion, and he tramples underfoot the very 
principle on which he lives, for which he and his fathers 
have sacrificed so much. Is it not tragic? For does it 
not imply that man, with all his long experience, all his 
slowly developed but real sensitiveness, cannot trust him- 
self against passion? 

But does not all society, all real life, rest upon the 
distinction between right and wrong being fundamental, 
and ever more profoundly real? If experience means 
anything, is it not the progressive discovery of the nature 
of right and wrong? And to confuse them, is it not the 
negation of the very idea of cosmos itself, a flat denial 
that there is any reality, any principle, in the universe? 
If the universe is rational, the distinction between right 
and wrong must be clear, definite, reliable at last, however 
long the process of discovery; and those who suffered 
to make the discovery ought surely to have the benefit 
of it. Otherwise human life is the voyage of a derelict, 
without chart or helm, and without port. 

God's own character is involved ; for if God can manage 
no better thing for such a wonderful spirit as Jesus of 
Nazareth than to fumble him into the hands of a con- 



THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 23 

temptible official like Pilate, to be hustled off to the cross 
and to perish as miserably as the man who sold him; if 
that is the whole story, the very idea of God becomes 
intolerable, and unthinkable. Imagine a God who creates 
man to feel exquisitely, who gives him an instinct and 
a passion for right and for justice, and then puts him 
into a position where all that is best in him is so much 
more needless and purposeless torture; where, in propor- 
tion as he is developed on every side of his nature, he is 
mocked the more by pain without meaning, 2 spiritual pain, 
the refined suffering that injustice, triumphant and im- 
becile, inflicts on the spirit that feels and understands. 
If that is the action of God, what is he but the most 
devilish of practical jokers — a hideous and hateful tor- 
mentor? Could there be better advice in that case than 
that of Job's wife — "Curse God and die"? But a man 
would do well to put his children out of God's reach 
first. That men do not kill their children and then them- 
selves as a general rule, is an indication that men will 
not think so ill of the universe, that they will not believe 
more than momentarily that right and wrong are negli- 
gible, that justice is not done. Men, with all history's 
records of cruelty and injustice, battling on in a world 
where actual and ideal are so far apart, believe that 
somehow or other God has still a word to say when man 
has done his worst. 

Then that scene of Pilate and Jesus is not the end of 
the story? That was the great question with mankind. 
For centuries men had been thinking and dreaming of 
another tribunal. From Homer down to Plato men had 
wrestled with the problem of justice. How could Zeus 
pretend to rule the universe and look on at what was 



3 Cf. Letter of Keats (on his voyage to Italy and to death) : "Is there 
another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, 
we cannot be created for this sort of suffering." To Charles Brown, 

September 28, 1820. 



24 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

done there? So asked Theognis, neither pietist nor phi- 
losopher, but a good conservative, shocked by the over- 
turn of the one society in which he believed. And so 
asked, sooner or later, all thinking men. The problem, 
somewhere or other, in one form and another, underlies 
all the tragedies of the great Greek dramatists. If 
Agamemnon is murdered, "the doer must suffer"; and 
the righteousness of the universe is proved by the slay- 
ing of Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra and the acquittal of 
Orestes. A generation later, the question is put again 
by Euripides, more pungently, and with a closer adher- 
ence to the facts of life. In his Trojan Women, for in- 
stance, punishment seems to impend upon the guilty, but 
all the time we know, and everybody knows, that Helen 
goes unpunished and all the misery and shame fall on 
the guiltless; and there is frankly no recompense to the 
good who suffer for the sins of others, unless perhaps 
Hecuba hits the dim clue to it: 

"0 stay of Earth, that hast thy seat on earth, 
Whoe'er thou art, ill-guessed and hard to know, 
Zeus, whether Nature's law, or mind of man, 
To thee I pray ; for on a noiseless path 
All mortal things by justice thou dost guide." 3 

Then the end of the play comes; her husband is dead, 
her sons are dead, her daughters are made human sac- 
rifices or given as concubines, her little grandson is killed 
for policy, and she is led away into slavery ; and the ques- 
tion remains. Law of nature, human intelligence, phys- 
ical basis of earth — what? — can it be that righteousness 
is the norm of all? And Euripides leaves us the ques- 
tion, heightened, not answered. 

Plato had to wrestle with the same problem. Obvious 
injustice revolts people; but supposing one could dodge 

•Troades, 884. 



THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 25 

its consequences? "Imagine the unjust man to be master 
of his craft, seldom making mistakes, and easily correct- 
ing them; having gifts of money, speech, strength — the 
greatest villain bearing the highest character ; and at his 
side let us place the just in his nobleness and simplicity — 
being, not seeming — without name or reward — clothed in 
his justice only — the best of men who is thought to be 
the worst, and let him die as he has lived — scourged, 
racked, bound, his eyes put out, at last impaled — and all 
this because he ought to have preferred seeming to be- 
ing." Men are taught to be righteous for the sake of 
the rewards; here the supposed order of things is re- 
versed; and the unrighteous man, rich by dishonesty, can 
worship the gods better and will be more loved by them 
than the just. 4 It will not do to quote poets and moral- 
ists: we all know what convention says (voftos) ; what 
does Nature (<£wns) say? Is the ultimate reality, what- 
ever it be, moral? Or is the whole idea of morality hallu- 
cination, or a humbug maintained by people for ulterior 
ends ? 

More than once Plato put his reply in the form of 
myth, premising that, without pressing details, a man of 
sense would say that this, or something like it, must be 
near the truth of things. In the Gorgias he describes a 
tribunal in the world beyond, where the judge judges 
every man as he comes before him, naked soul to naked 
soul ; the marks of earthly rank are gone, and the judge, 
not knowing who this is, looks with piercing eyes upon 
the naked soul, and sees this and this and this, and judges 
exactly by what he sees. Absolute justice, that is Plato's 
profoundest thought upon the world. Justice is for him 
the foundation of all existence and its inevitable end. 

The Jews had the same idea; but in their pictures the 
judge was not a shadowy figure like that of Plato's; he 



Jowett's summary of Rep., 11:360-362; a little abridged. 



26 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

would be God or God's anointed. In the centuries that 
overlap the life of Jesus they gave much thought to a 
last judgment that should put all things right. History 
could not be meaningless, they said; it would all come 
right; a catastrophic intervention by God would reveal 
the moral principle of the universe and establish it for- 
ever. The heart of man cried out for a judgment of 
righteousness and love. The evidence of the highest 
instincts of the human heart must count for something. 
Absolute justice — but how is one to reach it or to define 
it? What -shall the standard be? The real interest in 
history is to trace the rise of moral sense, the progress 
of ethical thinking. Justice, as Plato makes clear, 5 is not 
so simple a thing as a common sense person might sup- 
pose; and in fact the ethical standard of mankind has 
never been a fixed one. No code, human or divine, ever 
gave it finality, whatever commentators may read into 
it. Every age, consciously or unconsciously, rethinks the 
standards of its predecessors; there is ebb and flow, 
progress and relapse. But, if we take history as a whole, 
certain things become clear. Whatever relapse a par- 
ticular community may show, or even mankind together 
at any stage, there is a progress which is never lost from 
the outward and obvious to the inward and spiritual, to 
the larger, the deeper, the more universal. What is more 
striking is that in a world, where there is so much to 
depress hope, the fact stands out that, once the larger 
and deeper conception has become disentangled, whatever 
common sense or common terror may do in dark hours, 
the greater ideal is never defeated, it wins its way and 
it triumphs. History is a witness to God and to God's 
rationality, and to man's steady resolve to understand 
God and to capture his mind. In Homer the heroes are 
on a higher moral plane than the gods, and there they 



s Republic, 1:331 F. 



THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 27 

stay; till, after centuries of thought and suffering and 
progress, Plato drew the inference that the Homeric gods 
are not gods, and he drew it largely as a result of the 
conviction that they fell short in moral sense. 

"By all that He requires of me 
I know what God Himself must be." 

The modern couplet sums up a great deal of history. 
God has been interpreted over and over again through 
the moral sense of man ; he has revealed himself in man's 
experience. (We must be careful not to limit the mean- 
ing we give to the phrase, but to be sure that we recog- 
nize that man's experience includes a large number of 
elements, all available for his spirit.) Broadly, man's 
conception of God and man's ethical standards advance 
or recede together. 

Now, whether the universe is rational enough to con- 
firm him or not, it is recognized that, with the coming 
of Jesus, the conception of God became enlarged with 
new values, and acquired a richness and depth it never 
had before. 6 With this new view of God an inevitable 
progress followed in man's ethical ideas, in man's demand 
for justice, his insistence that the universe must be rea- 
sonable and just. Jesus may have been wrong in all this, 
and the universe may fall short of what he conceived to 
be inevitable from his experience of God. That is not 
our present affair; the point is that the progressive illu- 
mination which life threw, or seemed to throw, upon jus- 
tice and right, reached a new stage ; the old ideas were re- 
thought more powerfully than ever; the standards were 
advanced with a great sweep forward; more than ever 
before was asked of the universe, more was expected 
of God. 



•With this Chapter VI deals more fully. 



28 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

m 

The gtreat presentment of the results of this line of 
thought was given in the picture of the judgment seat 
of Christ. It owed something of its thought to Plato; 
it owed much of its color to the Jewish writers of apoca- 
lypses. 7 Men have to use the language of their day or 
to re-create it; and generally the story of a great idea 
shows a struggle with language. Sometimes the idea 
triumphs; sometimes the language and its traditions are 
too much for it. The Jewish apocalyptic offered the ob- 
vious language for Christian thought, not the ideal lan- 
guage. Its pictures were sharp-drawn and crude, and 
at the same time they lacked precision. 8 The catastrophic 
end of all things was clumsy and rather improbable; 
and the character of God had arbitrary features and 
lacked nobility and graciousness ; he was drawn too like 
the average man. Christians laid hold of the great scene 
of the Judgment Day. Its catastrophic character had an 
irresistible appeal to men strained beyond endurance in 
their struggle with the actual — with persecution, doubt, 
and despair. They varied, as the Jews had varied, in the 
detail of the scene; were the wicked to be judged (John 
5:29), or all men (1 Pet. 4:5) ? Was the judgment in a 
sense accomplished (John 3:18), or was it to come at 
the end of the world (Rev. 20:11-14) ? Was God to be 
the Judge (Heb. 12:23) or Christ (II Cor. 5:10)? 9 



7 Close analogies with Matthew. 25 are found in Enoch 14:3; 62:5; 90; 
and other such books, but without the firmness and coherence of the gos- 
pel version, in which, too, there is a development in principle. 

8 J. H. Leckie, World to Come, p. 27: "It is an excellent rule to sus- 
pect all accounts of Jewish doctrine in proportion as they suggest sym- 
metry, order, and logical coherence." 

• Even if we limit ourselves to St. Paul, scholars find it hard to make 
a harmony of his teachings; his eschatological views changed with his 
spiritual growth and experience. Cf. H. A. A. Kennedy, St. Paul and 
Last Things, pp. 21, 25; Stevens, Theology of N. T., p. 482; R. H. Charles, 
Apocrypha and Pseudonyma, I, 529; J. H. Leckie, World to Come, 
p. 181. 



THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 29 

A sane treatment of apocalyptic must be on the lines 
of our usual treatment of parable and of poetry. A 
forced harmony of details makes foolishness of the real 
value ; the suggestion of each picture must be seized and 
then the analogy must be dropped. At the same time, 
we have to recognize the extraordinary poetic value which 
the Last Judgment has had, for nothing lends itself to 
great poetry that has not some profound truth in it. 

To secure the deeper meaning of the Great Day to 
come, Dies irae dies ilia, let us go back to the judgment 
seat of Pilate. What was most real there? Pilate with 
his powers of life and death? the priests? the voice of 
the people? the hideousness of human cowardice and 
falsity, of mob-psychology? No, there was something 
more real. After all, it was not Jesus who was on trial 
before Pilate; it was the Jewish religion, it was the 
Roman Empire, it was human justice, on trial before 
Jesus. Pilate was judged for ever there and then by 
Jesus; and so were the priests, and the people who 
shouted for Barabbas, some because they wanted him, 
and some because they did not like to say anything else ; 
and so were all the men and women whose lives were 
shaped and determined, as they looked at Jesus on the 
Cross that day. That principle always holds. A man 
writes himself down when he says he does not like a 
great work of art, drama, or music, or picture. We 
exhibit our own characters in our judgments of Jesus 
Christ; we label ourselves, and, what is more, we give 
a turn to our development for good or ill. Pilate and 
Caiaphas and the rest had been, like all men, develop- 
ing character in the ordinary way — by choices, inclina- 
tions, and fancies, by tacit acceptances of principles of 
life. This day suddenly and for ever declared what type 
of men they had chosen to be, or had become by that 
negligence, which after all is a choice too. And, as al- 



30 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

ready suggested, the day confirmed their choices and fixed 
their characters ; they accepted themselves more definitely 
as they stood. The attitude of every man that day was 
partly the outcome of his former life and so revealed it; 
but it was also a new self-determination brought abou£ 
by the contact of the character he had developed with 
something wholly new, a new situation, a new type, and 
so it became decisive for the future. The day was as 
decisive for the other onlookers, for those who wept, for 
those who had looked away and would not see, for Simon 
the Cyrenian whom (and his sons after him) it brought 
into the circle of Jesus' followers. And the day was 
decisive for mankind; if it was to be a choice between 
Pilate and Jesus, then God's universe must fit and match 
one of them, and that one could hardly be Pilate. Pilate's 
universe will not do. 

The higher ideal prevails. The moral sense of man- 
kind has moved more and more to the standards of 
Jesus, as we can see in men's criticisms of the Church 
and of Christian people. "That," says the world, "is not 
what you expect of a Christian"; in which is implied 
that more is expected of a Christian than of another man. 
In other words, the world has curiously slipped into 
admitting that the standards of Jesus are at any rate the 
highest we have yet reached. Anyone who accepts this, 
is logically involved in a far more serious treatment of 
sin and in a profounder apprehension of God, a new 
study of reality. The world, in its more quiet and candid 
moods, when it is not controversial, knows quite well by 
now that the character and personality of Jesus are the 
ultimate standard. However uncertain about God we 
may be, Christian and non-Christian alike, deep in our 
hearts, if we put it in plain language, we have a feeling 
that if God really is like Jesus Christ, things are all 
right. In blunter language, what we really mean is this, 



THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 31 

that if God will mould himself on the example of Jesus, 
then we can trust him. That means that, for everyone 
who is dissatisfied with the justice of the world, there 
is eventually one court of appeal, the tribunal of Jesus 
Christ, that we live in a world where Jesus is the last 
word. 

The early Christians, and not they alone, went further. 
They were convinced that Jesus has the last word — a 
proposition not so different as it seems at first sight, if 
we concede that personality survives death. What is 
remarkable, is that Jesus would appear to have shared 
this belief, or something very like it, and this without 
being absurd or insane. In any case it is strange enough. 
For picture the carpenter's shop; a customer drops in 
and orders a plough to be made or a yoke," and the car- 
penter agrees to make it. Next day you can see him 
busy with it, bending over his bench, wiping the sweat 
from his face. You see him on the Galilaean road, dusty 
and dirty v ith long travel. You see him sitting by the 
roadside with a crowd of his friends, as they hand him 
bread and he passes them the salt. You see him drop off 
to sleep in a boat with sheer fatigue ; and at last you see 
him hanged on a cross. And then, within one generation, 
they say the world is going to be judged by that crucified 
carpenter. It is incredible; and yet mankind at its 
soberest and quietest has age by age said that it cannot 
think of anybody else. That is one aspect of Jesus in 
the experience of men. 

IV 

That Christians have believed that Jesus would judge 
the world in person, does not prove that he will. That 
is not, however, our point. We have to learn what they 



10 Justin, Dialogus cum Tryphone, 88, p. 316 C, says Jesus made 
these. 



32 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

have believed and do believe, and why; and the latter 
inquiry is the harder and the more profitable. We have 
to go further yet, however, and ask what effect the belief 
has had in the lives and characters of those who have 
held it. 

But first we must look a little more closely at the be- 
lief. It is that we must all, as Paul said (II Cor. 5:10), 
be inspected, made manifest, uncovered, before the 
judgment seat of Christ. It will be, as Plato put it, 
naked soul to naked soul. That has been the Christian 
thought; that he knows more about us than we know 
ourselves, and far more than some of our intimate friends 
know. He knows the temptation; the battle; the half- 
victory, which the world calls defeat. We have to remem- 
ber that, if Jesus is the same yesterday and today and 
for ever, the judge pictured by this early Church on that 
throne is the same friend who sits, says Paul, on the 
right hand of God and makes intercession for us — one 
of the most beautiful pictures of the New Testament. It 
is here that the simile of the human law court quite 
breaks down; the human judge limits his survey. But 
Jesus knows the full story; and he sets the same value 
on men and women as he did when he was here. In the 
stories of the dealings of Jesus with men and women 
we read how highly he valued the human soul; and by 
the statement that Jesus sits upon that final tribunal is 
meant that the human soul is to be judged by him who 
is most interested in it and loves it best. 

The outcome of this in ordinary life, has been that 
with every fresh realization of Jesus men have moved 
on to a firmer and more searching self-criticism. They 
have lived in the presence of the Great White Throne, 
and applied its standards all the way through life to 
themselves; and we know what great characters they 
grew. Lord Morley has spoken of men "fortified by the 



THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 33 

training in the habits of individual responsibility which 
Protestantism involves." 11 "Look exactly (aicpifius) how 
you walk," wrote Paul (Eph. 5:15). It has been de- 
scribed as the merit of Calvin's theology that it com- 
pelled men to contemplate themselves as for ever stand- 
ing face to face with the sovereign majesty of God." 
Lack of the self-criticism which Jesus induces is one of 
the reasons for the comparative failure of the Church 
today. 

Further, in proportion as men have seen the histor- 
ical Jesus oftener and spent more time in his company, 
they have been more sympathetic in their criticism of 
others. Shallow people are always right; they never 
have any difficulty in deciding the issue — I was going to 
say on half the evidence, but often they don't want so 
much; and their judgments are not generous. The real 
Jesus deepens human nature and sweetens it. Where 
men have realized the judgment seat of Christ, there has 
been a closer attention for unexpected manifestations 
of Jesus Christ. The Son of Man, as he said, comes in 
an hour when we look not for him. He comes in queer 
shapes and forms, in new duties, and, I think, particularly 
in the distasteful duty of thinking things over again. 
In the picture which Jesus himself draws of the last 
judgment, we find that the people on the left hand of 
the Judge got there by the simple process of inattention, 
by not thinking of things anew and often enough. There 
has always been poverty, they said, and thought no more 
of it. There has always been injustice; so we let it go. 
There has always been ignorance; so we did not trouble 
about it. Again and again that scene in King Lear comes 
into my mind in this connection. Lear on the heath 
realizes what poor houseless wretches have all their lives 



11 Compromise, p. 240. 

U A. V. G. Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, 303. 



34 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

through. "Oh ! I have ta'en," he cries, "too little care of 
this." The vision of Jesus on the throne makes men 
more responsive to truth that comes from the unpopular 
and the unpractical. It has meant a greater boldness in 
the confession of Christ. Put the issue: Is it the judg- 
ment seat of Pilate or the judgment seat of Christ that 
is final? If it is the judgment seat of Christ, men have 
felt secure in the confession of Christ; the growth of 
the sense of reality about the triumph of Christ has 
reacted upon their loyalty to him and to his teaching — 
and this to the great gain of all the world. And what 
peace of mind has come with the assurance that the last 
word is with Jesus, and that he and his understand one 
another, we do not need to read far in Christian literature 
to find out. A stanza of Charles Wesley may sum it up : 

"Jesus, my all in all ihou art, 

My rest in toil, my ease in pain; 

The medicine of my broken heart, 
In war my peace, in loss my gain: 

My smile beneath the tyrant's frown, 

In shame, my glory and my crown." 



CHAPTER III 
SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 



The curious thing about the title of Saviour is that, 
while today it is so natural to use it of Jesus, while it 
is the most valued and the most endearing of his names, 
it is not often used to describe him in the New Testa- 
ment. In that collection, the name Saviour is hardly 
given to Jesus in the earlier books, and begins to be applied 
to him only in those which scholars on other grounds 
think later or doubtful.* Jesus is called Saviour oftener 
in II Peter than in any other book. That is the stranger 
at first sight, because the words that are associated with 
Saviour are not so rare. "Salvation," for instance, is 
freely used by St. Paul and by the writer to the Hebrews, 
though in the Gospels hardly outside Luke. The verb "to 
save" is common throughout, and was used by Jesus him- 
self. "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that 
which was lost." If we ask why the word "Saviour" 
should not come so freely as "salvation" and the verb "to 
save," it is perhaps because it had to be redeemed from 
poorer associations. There are some words of honor 
never applied to him. In the New Testament Jesus is 
nowhere spoken of as "Benefactor." In those days "Bene- 
factor" and "Saviour" were royal titles; the Ptolemies 
and Seleucids had borne them and had passed. 



1 In Luke, John, Acts, Eph., Phil., I John, once each; the name is not 
used at all in Matthew, Mark, St. Paul's other larger epistles, Hebrews, 
or the Apocalypse. 

35 



36 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

The name "Saviour," moreover, belonged to competing 
religions; there were other gods who were called "sav- 
iour," gods of a different order. The mystery religions to 
which scholars are turning our attention so much (a good 
deal more than they need, I sometimes think) offered men 
salvation. There are those today who discover in that 
offer of salvation a close parallel to the Christian re- 
ligion. The parallel is by no means so close as is often 
imagined. 2 

It would be an interesting study to trace the reasons 
for the adoption of the word "salvation" by the Church 
in preference to "the Kingdom of God," which was the 
phrase used by Jesus at least at the beginning of his 
ministry. One cause for the change would probably be 
the transplanting of the Gospel to Gentile ground. 
"Messiah" was done into Greek, and became more a per- 
sonal name than a description. The whole series of con- 
ceptions bound up with the Messiah and the Kingdom of 
God were foreign to the Greek world. The Greeks and 
the Hellenized were entitled, if Christian freedom was 
anything at all, to choose the vocabulary which best con- 
veyed to them the fullness of their new experience. The 
Jew supposed he knew what Messiah and Kingdom of God 
meant, though his interpreters varied so widely that a 
stranger could reasonably plead that the terms lacked 
definition and did not convey any clear ideas. On the 
other hand, the Greek in similar way found more content 
in his own coinage of "salvation," though here, too, more 
ideas were covered by the term than conduced to clear 
thinking. So, while the title "Christ" survived, the 
"Kingdom of God" fell into the background ; and, in spite 
of efforts being made today to bring it forward again, 



3 It may be noted that in a very striking passage (Protr., 119) where 
Clement of Alexandria uses the Mysteries as simile point by point, his 
reference is not to sacraments but to spiritual vision, etc. 



SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 37 

it is possible to maintain that "salvation" was an expres- 
sion that could carry a larger burden of Jesus' meaning. 
Professor Percy Gardner has suggested that the con- 
ception of salvation belonged to the religions of men 
more contemplative than the Jews. 8 Whatever its ulti- 
mate origin in Eastern cults, it was at once available 
to convey the deepest ideas current in religion in the 
early Roman Empire. It lent itself to Greek individual- 
ism, which stood on a higher level of intensity than any- 
thing of the kind generally recognized in Judaism. Jere- 
miah may have been — most people would concede that he 
was — more personal in his religion, in his relation with 
his God, than any Greek we can name; but none the less, 
as the history of the doctrine of immortality shows no 
less plainly than the civil and political history of almost 
any Greek state, the individual meant more to the average 
Greek than to the average Jew. What interested the 
Greek was not the restoration of a kingdom to a gen- 
eralized Israel, or anything else in the plural and the 
abstract, but the development of his own soul, mind, and 
nature to the utmost, and its securing amid all the 
changes of worlds and ages. Even those who today 
revive the Kingdom of God as a sufficient religious ideal 
can only do it by including tacitly the Greek demand for 
individual life in the old Hebrew conception, or by letting 
go something that the Greeks have gained for mankind. 
It is legitimate, indeed inevitable, to hold that Jesus saw 
in the individual far more than any apocalyptist of his 
people ever dreamed, and that when he used the current 
phrase, he did what he had always to do, he used the best 
language available, endeavoring as he used it to give it 
a newer and more glorious connotation. Most of what he 
meant to convey was included in the term salvation. 
Here, once more, it was not till the Greek received the 



8 Growth of Christianity, p. 128. 



38 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

Gospel, that a language was found at all equal to ex- 
pressing the mind of Jesus. 

But we use language at our own peril; and the term 
salvation needed revision and purification, and it has had 
it. Today it is difficult for anyone not an archaeologist, 
and unacquainted with Indian thought, to realize that the 
term is susceptible of other than a conventional Christian 
meaning. Hence when we are told that Christianity was 
only one of a number of religions which offered men sal- 
vation, an idea is often conveyed that the Christian relig- 
ion hardly differed from the rest. A closer examination of 
the meaning of these offers of salvation and the charac- 
ters of the cults that made them is necessary. 

There are, however, some preliminary considerations. 
First of all, the documents, on which our knowledge of 
those religions depends, have to be dated; and a liturgy 
is perhaps the hardest of all books to date, in that it is 
very generally a mosaic of fragments from older docu- 
ments and may be endlessly edited and reedited. This 
formula or that prayer may be far older than the rest of 
the book ; the larger part of the compilation may be good 
evidence for the beliefs of an earlier day, or the whole 
may be quite modern work, done in an artificially 
archaized style. In such literature borrowing is easy 
and adaptation is easy, especially before the invention 
of printing, when books were still made singly and in 
manuscript; and the easier such operations were for the 
priest, the less surely can they be checked by the scholar 
hundreds of years later. It is, again, arguable that to 
amalgamate features found in different cults and so to 
form a common type of mystery religion, and then to 
impose this type upon the cults and to assume that they 
generally conformed to it, is not legitimate scholarship. 
Mr. Edwyn Bevan, in a striking article in the Hibbert 
Journal (October, 1912), pointed out that more is talked 



SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 39 

by moderns about saviour-gods and their deaths and 
resurrections than the evidence is readily equal to prov- 
ing; that they are not at all so plentiful as some people 
suppose; that, when some Gnostic sects have them and 
others do not, it is not enough for a scholar to label them 
Gnostic gods; and that the Gnostic sects which have 
saviour-gods may as probably (or under the circum- 
stances more probably) have borrowed from Christianity 
as Christianity from Gnosticism. It is, further, to be 
noted that to the end Christian polemic is directed 
against the Olympian gods and that allusions to compet- 
ing sacraments are not so common. Julian the Apostate 
prayed with fervor to Athena. 

But, if we knew for certain that the Gnostic sects and 
the mystery religions had every one a doctrine of salva- 
tion and even a personal saviour-god, not much is proved. 
Salvation is a vague term. It makes all the difference 
from what these various cults offered salvation, and to 
what, or for what, and by what means. We find that 
men's minds in the centuries round the Christian era 
were obsessed by astrology 4 and other doctrines from 
the East; they were full of planets and their influences, 
of fate and destiny ; and all these things were interwoven 
with religion, with belief in immortality, with dread of 
the long journey before the soul, if transmigration with 
its "sorrowful weary wheel" were true. Men wanted 
assurance for their personality, and escape from fate and 
destiny, 6 and all the fears of life and death. 

It is a curious and interesting thing, that some of the 
most beautiful phases of Indian religion in these last 
centuries have had the same endeavor, to set men free 



* See generally Cumont, Astrology and Religion, and his Oriental Reli- 
gions in Roman Empire; and P. Wendland's brilliant book, Die hellen- 
istische-romische Kultur. 

6 Cf. H. A. A. Kennedy, St. Paul and the Mystery Religions, pp. 24, 
216; Welland, op. cit., p. 176; Reitzenstein, Hell. Myst. Rellg., p. 38; 
Poimandres, p. 103. 



40 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

from the chain of act and deed ; free by virtue of a union 
with a God who will lift them out of it all, lift them out 
of the hands of fate, out of the power of death and re- 
birth, and set them free from all the play of circum- 
stance and pain and sorrow. The very striking poems of 
Tuka Ram, 8 the Maratha mystic of the same period as 
the English Vaughan, haunt the reader. "I know thy 
faith," says Tuka, addressing his god, Vitthoba, "I have 
grasped thy feet, I will not let them go. I will not take 
anything to let them go. I have clung to them so long 
that thou wilt find it an old affair and a perplexing one to 
get rid of me. Tuka says, I will not let thee go, not if 
thou givest me all else." "He fastens us to his waist- 
cloth and takes us quickly across the stream of the 
world." "I have had enough of running . . . now 
take me on thy hip; do not make me walk any more." 
Those who have seen the Indian child riding on his 
mother's hip, will know what Tuka means, when he says : 
"We sit on his hip, hence we have full confidence." Some 
of Dr. Nicol Macnicol's verse renderings of Tuka might 
be interpolated among Cowper's poems from Madame 
Guyon, and not be detected without reference to the 
French. 

But what is "the stream of the world"? In other 
poems Tuka speaks of the awful prospect of ceaseless in- 
carnation that the doctrine of Karma involves; "eight 
million times have I to enter the gate of the womb"; 
and he tells of the desolation that the doctrine makes of 
love and friendship, and of the family. He compares 
son, brother, father, and wife to logs jammed on a stream 
in flood ; the key-log is drawn ; the water rushes over the 
land and the logs are scattered and none touches its neigh- 
bor again; and so it is with all we love in the stream 



•Translated in three volumes by Frazer and Marathe. See also a 
selection in English verse in Nicol Macnicol's Psalms of Maratha 
Saints (1919). 



SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 41 

of the world, we meet to part for ever, while each pur- 
sues up and down the weary cycle of eight million lives. 
Tuka and other mystics of India believed that from this 
a man might be saved by Bhakti, by self-annihilating de- 
votion to a friendly god. 7 Karma and Bhakti are the 
two poles of Indian religious thought. Vitthoba seemed 
to Tuka to promise salvation ; but even if Madame Guyon 
and he have some affinity, as all mystics are said to have, 
it was not such a salvation as Tuka conceived of, that 
William Cowper believed he had lost. 

The salvation offered by the mystery cults of the 
Roman Empire was of much the same character; it was 
escape from death and its concomitants, from reincarna- 
tion, but not from sin, unless salvation from sin con- 
tributed to the main purpose. Their moral teaching was 
perhaps not negligible, but it was not in the first line. 
It was of secondary importance ; and when morality takes 
a subordinate place, it may as well be left out. It re- 
mains a fact that these religions fell far short of the 
teaching of the great philosophers of antiquity. 

Into this world, full of moral impulses and moral teach- 
ing, full of religions that offered salvation, comes a new 
religion, which unites the moral and the devotional, which 
brings ethics into the very heart of religion and makes 
God the center of morality. Those who speak of Chris- 
tian salvation as if it were merely what was offered by 
those old religions — escape from death and fear of death, 
or, as if it were some doubtfully moral device invented 
by Jesus to tamper with God's moral order — can surely 
not have looked far into the mind of Jesus himself. Noth- 
ing can be less like the meaning of Jesus. 

One thing, however, we have to note. The Christian 
idea of salvation has never really been a fixed one. It 
has always tended to enlarge its scope as men have en- 



7 Cf . Nicol Macnicol, Indian Theism, pp. 107 ff. 



42 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

tered into the ideas of Jesus ; and that is one of the ways 
in which Jesus has asserted himself, and one of the rea- 
sons why he remains. He keeps opening the eyes of the 
Church to larger vision of his meaning and of his 
thought. Salvation must have a wide range when it 
comes from Jesus. Could he have offered men a salva- 
tion as pitiful as some of us conceive? His conception 
of salvation will be large as his thoughts of men, and 
deep and high and wonderful as his thoughts of God; 
greater as we grow to understand it. 

II 

We can begin by asking from what the Christian re- 
ligion offered men salvation, and offers it still. 

First of all we may put fear. It is extraordinary, the 
range of fear in human experience. There are physical 
fears of pain, sickness, and death, fears that we share 
with the animals. There are more human fears like the 
fear of bereavement, of which the animal knows a little, 
and men and women so much. There are fears of death, 
not 'because it wipes out me, but because it wipes out 
someone else. 8 A man of fine spirit spoke to me of his 
daughter: "I would give anything," he said, "to have it 
proved to me that I should see her again." If we refuse 
to be overborne by death and add to the range of our 
outlook a world beyond the grave, the very addition in- 
creases the scope of fear and doubt. There rise the 
horror, the uncertainty, and the bad dreams of that other 
world in which we may find ourselves. The ancient 
world was possessed with the fear of daemons; a large 



8 To illustrate this, three familiar lines of one of the finest spirits of 
antiquity may be quoted — Georgics, 2:490: 

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas 
Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum 
Subjecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari. 



SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 43 

part of mankind today is haunted with the fear of 'being 
born into this world again. The writer to the Hebrews 
speaks of men who all their lives, through fear of death, 
were subject to bondage. Fear, then, is obviously the 
first thing from which we have to be saved. It is worth 
noting that the early Christian gave a large place to 
death among the things from which Christ saves. Paul 
obviously connected physical death with the coming of 
moral evil into the world — a view difficult to the modern 
biologist, and not based, so far as we know, on anything 
in the teaching of Jesus. 9 

The Christian brought news to the world that Jesus 
lives, and that Jesus has "abolished" death, and brought 
life and immortality to light. The ancients thought 
meanly of woman ; woman was the weaker vessel, and they 
saw with surprise women laying down their lives for 
Jesus Christ, without having a Plato to write about them, 
as Socrates had. Women and slaves, the cheapest of 
human beings, showed no fear of pain and no fear of 
death for his sake. We have already considered the 
Christian victory over the daemons. Thus the chief fears 
of the ancient world were overcome. 

But there are other things more insidious than fear; 
and here is the profounder and more permanent half of 
the early Christian message. "Joy or grief, fear or de- 
sire, what matters it?" asked Horace, 10 quoting the estab- 
lished classification of motives. Socrates held that if a 
man knew, he would not sin; but even an Ovid could 
mend that with his video meliora proboque, deteriora 



9 It appears to be a Jewish idea. Cf. Schechter, Studies in Judaism, 
260. Dr. D. S. _ Cairns writes to me: "Of course it was a practically 
universal Jewish idea, deeply rooted in the O.T. . . . Jesus quite cer- 
tainly regarded disease as part of the kingdom of evil, and as something 
that ought never to have been. There is not the slightest indication 
that he thought differently from Paul, and a good deal to indicate that 
he agreed with him and all other Jews of his day." I am not sure that 
Jtuus' acceptance of current ideas can be counted on so certainly. 

10 Epistles, I, vi, 12; Cf. Virgil, 2En., vi:733; and Plato, Phaedo, 83, B. 



44 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

sequor, passion triumphant over knowledge and sweeping 
man into evil with open eyes. "What I would not, that I 
do," said Paul, carrying the matter a stage further. 
Some of the ancients explained sin by making it the out- 
come of contact or relation with some external thing. 
The sounder psychologists saw with Jesus that it comes 
from within, but not all of them realized its significance 
as an expression of a man's real self. The light that 
leads astray is, as Burns said, light from heaven — the 
perversion of a gift of God, of the highest of his gifts. 
And this is effected by passion, which starts a new group 
of fears. In the war many a man was less afraid as to 
what the enemy might do than as to what he might him- 
self do. Fear of moral lapse comes to be in the highest 
and ultimate group of fears ; and with it comes the dark- 
est of all things, despair. Fear, passion, and despair all 
coming from within, there was a place for the Christian 
message of a man's salvation from himself. Jesus Christ 
can set you free, it ran, from the man within, so that 
passion and anger and craving will no longer rule you. 
The mystery religions had a cheaper psychology and an 
easier, and they did not really touch this region of fear 
■ — a contrast which makes more wonderful the salvation 
which Jesus brought. 

So far, we have thought of perils round about us, and 
of evil within. But God, where does God touch this 
story? Paul speaks of the law and its value, but also of 
its terror; and as the Greek philosophers traced the 
origin of law to nature, he traced it to God ; the law was of 
God's giving, implanted in man's nature. The Ten Com- 
mandments are written large in human society. There is 
no real human society without them. If we could imagine 
God abolished, we should still have to keep the Decalogue 
: — "thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, 
thou shalt not kill." But God is more than the law. The 



SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 45 

Scripture speaks of the wrath of God, not as the heathen 
who feared the irritability of his gods, but of a wrath 
of God directed against men who broke his law. The 
burden of the law on a nature like Paul's was incessant 
and it filled life with boding and fear. "Fear hath tor- 
ment" (Uohn4:18). 

The object of pagan worship has again and again been 
to placate the ill-temper of gods, or, to induce the gods 
to go away and leave the worshipper alone. The won- 
derful part of the Christian message was that men were 
given deliverance not by being taken out of the way of the 
wrath of God, but by being brought into the very heart 
of God. There is another phase of this. When Paul wants 
to describe a life that is desperate, he speaks of man 
being without hope and without God in the world. With- 
out God — how like that is to Jesus' picture of the prodi- 
gal son! He was without his father, as he had wished 
to be. He went to a far country to have a good time, as 
people call it, and like other people who have a good 
time, he went through his money; he came to starvation, 
and he was without food, without friends and without his 
father. It was no life at all; not natural, but abnormal, 
an existence of despair. "This is the condemnation 
that . . . men loved darkness rather than light" (John 
3:19), as men will whose eyes are in bad condition. The 
Christian promise was of deliverance from all this nega- 
tion of life, from the abnormal, from the unnatural, from 
despair; but the Christian "return to Nature" and "life 
according to Nature" had a personal center. 

Ill 

When Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son, he 
brings out, with a beauty that grows upon those who 
try to understand him, the great surprise that awaited 



46 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

the youth on his return. He hoped for food, and perhaps 
some clean clothes; but the first thing to which he was 
restored was his father. He came back like a tramp, and 
the first touch of home is his father's kiss on his cheek; 
his father's arms round his neck. He was restored to the 
best robe, the most splendid entertainment, yes, and 
something more ; to sonship, to the real life of the family, 
to his father. And in all this, the real restoration was to 
his father, and the rest followed. What a picture! The 
personal relation lies at the heart of all Jesus' good news. 

"The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which 
is lost," he said. He enters into the house of the strong 
man not to destroy but to reapply what is held there in 
bondage. He restores to men their lost vision; he finds 
the lost faculty and gives it back; the lost aptitude; the 
lost sympathy; the lost intuition. Men have never been 
quite able to explain what salvation is. They have al- 
ways used metaphors. Paul says it is a new creation. A 
man is made over again, very much as if God took a man 
to pieces and made a new Adam out of him, and put the 
new Adam in a new world. The Fourth Gospel sums it 
up as being born again. In an ancient poem about spring, 
one line runs: "New spring, singing spring, spring the 
world reborn." 11 One would almost think it a description 
of what we read in the New Testament. 

Century after century we find the Christian Church 
speaking in the same way about the gladness of the Holy 
Spirit. Some of the words which the ancients used about 
the Holy Spirit have gone downhill. I suppose it was 
because people could not believe them to be true of the 
Holy Spirit and the Christian life ; for the ancient Chris- 
tians said that the Church was hilarious, that the 
Christian spirit is a hilarious spirit, a gay spirit. The 



11 Pervigilium Veneris, II: "Ver novum, ver jam canorum, ver retin- 
itis orbis est." 



SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 47 

words hardly seem reverent today. But think of the 
buoyancy of a life which has been saved in earnest. Some 
people do not give its value to "life" as used in the New 
Testament; they picture the Christian life as a starved 
affair, and think that the Christian can never enjoy any- 
thing", but that, if he starts to enjoy himself, he is always 
told "Don't." Jesus never said that. "I am come that 
they might have life, and that they might have it more 
overflowingly" — the utmost development of the ideal 
and natural life, the real achievement at last of its 
promise. 

In the mind of Jesus it would appear that a man is 
aibove all things saved for God, for in the story of the 
prodigal the happiest figure is the father. Salvation is 
restoration to God, "peace with God" as Paul calls it 
(Rom. 5:1). Here we have once more to give to the name 
God the whole connotation that Jesus gave it; salvation 
has to be measured by the scale of Jesus' conception of 
God. How much, he would suggest, would God imply by 
salvation? No mere rescue from an external hell, as 
Odysseus escapes from the sea and comes ashore scathed 
and stripped, and only just alive, if saved. That is not 
how Jesus conceives of God doing things. "Fear not, 
little flock; it is your Father's good pleasure to give you 
the kingdom." 

Salvation, again, in the speech of Jesus, means that the 
man saved gains a new sense of the significance of other 
men; that he puts a new value on manhood and its 
opportunities; that he is captured for all the ideals of 
Jesus Christ, as they bear on men, the family, and the 
society; that he is found in the service of Jesus Christ 
for the ransom of the world, for the setting free of man- 
kind. That is not a negative idea. It is positive, and the 
larger the more we think it out, as large as the measure 
of Jesus Christ himself (Eph. 4:13). This is not theory; 



48 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

it is the actual experience of the Christian world. We 
may fairly allow that Christian experience has given a 
very different value to the term "salvation" from what 
it had in the mystery religions. 

IV 

The mystery religions gave salvation by ritual and 
fasting, by sacred food and mystic drink. When we come 
to discuss how Jesus saves men it will be clear at once 
to anyone who has studied him, that his way will be 
another, and something much more spiritual, and more 
intimate. When we ask what it is, difficulties crowd 
upon us, so much has been thought and written upon it, 
so standardized are many of our ideas. Metaphors from 
sacrifice, suggestions from the mystery religions, modes 
of thought borrowed from Roman law, have all affected 
our ordinary views, till it is difficult now to explain what 
Jesus did without a preliminary discussion to make our 
explanatory terms themselves intelligible. Today, instead 
of using metaphor, we are more apt to ask what happens 
in salvation, conversion, or whatever it be called — 
psychologically; what passes between Christ, or God, and 
the man concerned. 

Here, though it may seem to run counter to what has 
just been said, an illustration may help. It has the ad- 
vantages of not being theological, of having no history, 
and of being drawn from nature. Some years ago the 
cotton crop in Egypt began to fail. The cotton plant was 
doing badly; it had a parasite growing upon it. A 
botanist was sent out to Egypt, and he embarked on a 
series of experiments. He found that, when the cotton 
was kept in a certain temperature, the parasitic plant 
throve and killed it. As the temperature of the glass- 
house was raised, the parasite plant drooped, and the 



SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 49 

cotton throve ; and finally the cotton got clear of it. After 
a while he was able to tell the cotton-growers what was 
wrong; they were irrigating too much; the ground was 
cold with water; and when the roots struck down into 
the cold earth, the plant was chilled and the parasite 
grew. When they changed the irrigation arrangements, 
the parasite died, and the cotton plant lived, saved by a 
change of temperature. 

The curse of human life is the failure to develop. A 
man becomes absorbed by this or that, by pleasure, by 
business, by vice it may be, or by wholly legitimate in- 
terests carried out of proportion; and he becomes, as we 
say, one-sided. Nothing saves him but a human interest 
in a real person ; he falls in love and revises all his stand- 
ards, and, unconsciously influenced by the woman's love 
for him and by his love for her — if she be a woman of 
any real worth and capable of helping a man — he de- 
velops into a new creature, as we casually say. If she 
bears him a child, the child lifts husband and wife into 
a new atmosphere, alters the temperature of their lives, 
and a great deal of selfishness is atrophied by the warmth 
and interest that the child makes, as its life and mind 
grow and expand ; they live in a region of higher thoughts 
and keener hopes and delights. Psychologically, love, in 
such a case as this, does for a man what the higher tem- 
perature did for the Egyptian cotton. 

The simplest and most natural explanation of what 
Jesus effects comes to us along the same lines. Jesus 
changes the spiritual temperature and the parasite sin 
dies; and the natural man 12 revives and grows into what 
God meant. It has been one of our greatest mistakes to 



12 We need not be frightened of the Authorized Version's translation 
of an adjective of St. Paul's. Perhaps if we took refuge from a word 
of Latin origin in one of Greek, we might say "physical" for Paul's 
\l(uxixds. Prof . Moffatt says, "unspiritual" (I Cor. 2:14), and "animate" (I 
Cor. 15:44). "Natural" is better kept for $u<us and its derivatives. 



50 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

think that the Christian virtues are anything but natural ; 
we have abused the word "natural" and degraded it. 
Nature, in its true sense, is the thought of God; and man 
degraded and atrophied by sin is not natural. The 
gracious side of human nature (as real every whit as the 
ugly) gives us the clue. The beautiful instincts, the 
powers of mind and character, make, we feel, the true 
man. What Jesus does is to give them a chance to grow. 
He has opened the windows of the human heart, or rather 
has tempted the human heart to open its own windows, 
to the sunshine of God. It would seem as if St. Paul had 
anticipated us here, when he says that "God has shined 
in our hearts, in the face of Jesus Christ" (II Cor. 4:6). 

Those of us who think about germs (and most people 
do today), who are interested in hospitals, know that the 
air of God and the sunshine of God are two of the most 
healing and protecting things the body can have. Jesus 
told men, and, what is more, he made men believe, that 
what we want is more of God, and not less. The sun- 
shine of God was let into the human heart by Jesus, and 
the real, beautiful human plant began to thrive in that 
sunshine, and sin to die. He brought men to the point 
where they would be reconciled to God. He did this by 
his death on the Cross — that death in which he showed 
the real nature of God, and brought men to believe that 
God does not leave them and their pain and sin alone, 
but identifies himself with man's life. Jesus came into 
the world to make people willing to believe that God was 
ever so much better than they thought, to offer reconcilia- 
tion, freedom of mind and heart's-ease. 

It is always a person who opens the door to the higher 
life for us — wife, child, father, mother, friend. The 
great book that inspires us was written by a man or 
woman of a great personality. All the best things and 
the greatest, the great idea, the new vision, peace of 



SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 51 

mind, come to us, each of them, through a person; and 
salvation in the highest sense came through Jesus. 
"Jesus," as Herrmann says, 18 "did not write the story of 
the Prodigal Son on a sheet of paper for men who knew 
nothing of himself." Men looked into their language 
and found that he was the only person to whom the name 
salvation in the highest sense came through Jesus, 
been given to kings ; it has not been given to other gods ; 
it has become more and more his own, until today the 
word means no one else. 



18 Communion with God, p. 132. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE LAMB OF GOD 

The death of Jesus has been the subject of more 
thought, one may say without exaggeration, than any- 
thing that has occupied the mind of man. No treatment 
of it ever satisfies listener or reader as complete or ade- 
quate ; the best gives one the sense of having touched, as it 
were, the mere hem of the garment. Whenever we look at 
him, and think again of his death with any firmness and 
reality, most of our previous thought seems to be of little 
consequence, and we are left with the feeling of a 'great 
unexplored world before us, of more beyond. In this it 
resembles the great things of Nature, which are never 
exhausted, which always have mystery and wonder and 
happiness in reserve. A man who supposes that he can 
speak with any adequacy of the death of Jesus is simply 
not thinking about it at all. But the very difficulty of the 
subject and the failure of attempts to deal with it are 
compulsive reasons for studying it. It is too central, too 
vital, to go unstudied. Better to fail than not to attempt 
it, for failure will at least reveal something of the great- 
ness of the subject. 



There are many theories as to the death of Jesus; 
and a certain number of them, all ancient and all derived 
from metaphor, we may group under three heads. There 
are those that turn on sacrifice; and here (on one side of 

52 



THE LAMB OF GOD 53 

it) we may include the theory of substitution. There 
are those that rest on conceptions derived from Roman 
l aw — a nd deal with courts, fines, penalties and satisfac- 
tion, with "persons" too. There are those, the simplest, 
the most readily understood, and in antiquity the most 
immediately moving, which are connected with metaphors 
of slavery; redemption, ransom, price, and freedom are 
the keywords here. None really covers the whole story. A 
metaphor like a parable may be expected to light up one 
aspect of a subject. To press either beyond the proper 
point which it should illuminate, to force meaning from 
all its details (or, more often, into them) destroys its 
value. People who have no feeling for language take 
things literally; the legal mind does it; and both classes 
have had a large share in interpreting Christian doctrine. 
Where the metaphor is drawn from conceptions that are 
fairly stable, the difficulties are less; but there are few 
sources of confusion more fatal than the use of language, 
which seems to convey a clear idea but is really indefinite. 
A wholly unfamiliar expression or illustration challenges 
thought; but a familiar phrase, that is not generally 
thought out, passes without challenge. The simple trick 
of asking a man to write down the figures on the dial of 
his watch, may illustrate the point; he thinks he knows 
them, but the chances are he makes at least one clear 
mistake ; the mind usurps the function of the eye and is 
wrong. If we are to treat religion as seriously as we do 
science or literature or politics, we must be sure of our 
terms. Careless language always means loose thinking, 
and it suggests unreality which serious people are quick 
to feel. Little wonder that men have leaned to the sus- 
picion that the Christian religion is unreal, when Chris- 
tian terminology is so often slipshod. 

It is not our present affair to pursue inquiry into all 
the fields of metaphor where Christians have strayed. 



54 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

But sacrifice has been a central thought, and it differs 
from most of the other metaphors, notably from those 
mentioned above, in having had no secular history. It 
has always been a religious term, uniquely associated with 
ancient religion through the whole course of its develop- 
ment; for to many minds in all periods the sacrifice has 
been the very center of all religion. This of itself will 
explain why the word is so difficult and ambiguous. Re- 
ligion has changed constantly, and the feelings waked 
from age to age by sacrifice have been those which men 
are most reluctant to analyze. It is worth noting, how- 
ever, that the men who did analyze them became the 
pioneers in religion. 

"The Lamb of God" is a very interesting phrase, and 
it has gathered a great mass of associations. It does not 
"belong to the earliest stratum of the New Testament, 
though Paul's "Christ our passover" (I Cor. 5:7) points 
owards it. It is put by the Fourth Gospel in the mouth 
of John the Baptist in a sentence that attributes to Jesus 
the taking away of the sin of the world. In the Apoca- 
lypse the visions of the exile are haunted with the Lamb 
victorious, the Lamb unlocking the sealed book of God's 
purposes, the Lamb surrounded by ten thousand times 
ten thousand clad in white, who 

'•'Ascribe their conquest to the Lamb, 
Their triumph to his death." 

To understand the writer, we must ask how he comes 
to interpret life so, and why he links the victory of 
Christ with the figure of the sacrificial lamb. For, of 
course, it comes from Hebrew ritual, with a memory of 
the Passover. Hebrew ritual suggests the symbol; but 
why did anyone look for a symbol? What was the ex- 
perience that sought expression? The Passover lamb 
was a symbol of a number of things — of a great escape 



THE LAMB OF GOD 55 

from bondage to begin ; and its reappearance in the Apo- 
calypse suggests that the Christian had in his mind the 
sense of a great deliverance. It suggests acceptance by- 
God, and God's care for his own; and these also were in 
the thoughts of the great Christian writer. Gradually, 
by thinking through his language, his turns of phrase, 
and his symbols, we come face to face with a man who 
associates a great deal of real experience with Jesus 
Christ. 

But it will not quite do to say that sacrifice is the 
natural word to use to unlock the mystery of Jesus. For 
today, after nineteen centuries of experience of Jesus, 
almost every idea that men then associated with sacrifice 
is lost or transformed — a curious commentary on the 
notion that the use of the word was obvious. If we are 
to understand what the writers of the Bible say about 
sacrifice, we have for the time to strip our minds of all 
that Jesus has done in reshaping our speech. When I 
think now of sacrifice, I see a Hindu temple in the 
bright sunlight of a December day, a temple gaudy with 
blues and yellows and whites, tawdry and dirty, and 
thronged with pilgrims. Here was a sacred tree with 
votive rags tied on every bough; on the other side was 
a group of priests, naked from the waist up (one of 
them telling us he is a B.A. of the University), and near 
them was a little goat, a sacrifice, to be given to the god- 
dess. One of the priests caught it up, held its front 
legs back against its sides, put its head in a great wedge ; 
and with one slash of a big knife the head was off and 
the blood spurted out. When I read in Hebrews that "it 
is not possible for the blood of bulls and of goats to take 
away sin," I think of Kalighat, and I understand. People 
today associate primarily self-sacrifice with "sacrifice"; 
not so the ancients. 

One day in the market of Maymyo, in Upper Burma, an 



56 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

American friend and I stood by an old man who was sell- 
ing tapers of some fragrant kind. The missionary, 
knowing well what they were, asked him : "And what are 
those for?" He said they were to be given to the god. 
"But what does the god do with them ?" And the old man 
said: "I don't know; we give them to the idol." "I don't 
know!" The ancient world, when it crossquestioned it- 
self, did not know where exactly in religion was the place 
of sacrifice. Even of the Hebrews Professor A. B. David- 
son wrote that "the sacrificial system is left in the Old 
Testament without explanation as regards redemptive 
relations, except in a general way." 1 And to think in a 
general way is a most fertile source of error, as the 
Greeks have taught us, from Socrates onward. 

II 

The longer the history of an idea, the less chance there 
is that at any moment it will be used clearly. Old 
memories and emotions, old associations linger and con- 
fuse the impression; and where truth of utmost moment 
is concerned, an indefinite impression does not much help 
thought. A survey of the development of the conception 
of sacrifice will put us in a better position to deal with 
its use in Christian thinking. Six stages may be noted 
for clearness' sake, if it be understood that, while logi- 
cally they are distinct, chronologically they overlapped in 
the most perplexing way. 

The first stage, which anthropologists can recapture for 
us, is one so old that it appears to antedate private prop- 
erty 2 — a fact of the utmost moment in interpreting the 
ideas then associated with sacrifice, for it practically 
eliminates the individual from the act. The sacrifice is 



1 A. B. Davidson, Theology of the Old Testament, p. 307. 

2 W. Robertson Smith, Early Religion of the Semites, p. 395. 



THE LAMB OF GOD 57 

tribal, and it is a tribal meal, shared by god and men, 
eating together 8 for the "reinforcement of both divine and 
human life." 4 The victim is an animal, but not substi- 
tuted, as ancient thinkers later on supposed, for a human 
being; for early man believed in the "full kinship of ani- 
mals with men." 5 A living bond was established between 
god and worshippers in this common meal, whose funda- 
mental idea was sacramental communion. 6 The operation 
was as physical in the case of the god as of the man. 
The god drank the blood of the victim ; that is to say, it 
was poured over the stone, which was the god, or (later 
on) represented him or was his dwelling (beth-el, /3atrvXos.) 
"The blood is the life," we read in Deuteronomy (12:23) ; 
and the scene in the Odyssey, where the ghosts crowd 
round Odysseus, explains how it is. Such ghosts as he 
allows to drink the blood of the sacrificed sheep regain a 
fugitive life; "My mother came and drank the dark 
blood; and forthwith she knew me and with wailing 
spake winged words." 7 Before she drank she could neither 
recognize her son, nor speak to him. The blood in sac- 
rifice repaired the waning force and efficiency of the god ; 
and when restored he was more likely to give victory, or 
crops, or whatever men had felt him to be failing to 
manage before. The conception, however strange and 
crude in our eyes, was not unnatural for people who did 
not yet distinguish clearly between matter and spirit. At 
this stage sacrifice is closely akin to magic; and the 
borderline between primitive religion and magic is hard 
to trace. 

In the second stage, men begin to lay more stress on 
the mind of their god than on his physical necessities, 
and they conceive that the business of sacrifice is to 
reconcile their god to them rather than to repair his 



s Ib. 252. *Ib. 257. 5 76. 124, 365. • lb. 439. "Odyssey, xi:152. 



58 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

energies." Sacrifice is a gift to placate an offended god. 
The ground of his irritation may be unknown or, if 
guessed, may be quite trivial. He has, however, to be 
coaxed out of his ill-temper. This type of sacrifice, the 
piacular, does not primarily include the idea of sin, 8 but 
it recognizes some mental activity and feeling in the god. 
It is said to have had but a small part in the development 
of the higher sense of sin that we find in the Old Testa- 
ment. 10 The "presents," which Genesis says Cain and 
Abel offered, have a parallel in the Greek poet: "Gifts 
persuade the gods, gifts persuade awful kings." 11 Primi- 
tive law and primitive morality deal almost entirely with 
acts, not with motives. It was late in history, and a 
great forward step taken, when Draco in Athens dis- 
tinguished between intentional and accidental homicide. 
But this second stage represents a distinct advance in 
thinking. 

The third stage gives us the piacular sacrifice, more 
properly so called — the sin-offering, a gift made in 
acknowledgment of wrong done by the offerer or by those 
whom he represents. What the idea of the wrong is, 
depends naturally on the current conceptions of morals; 
but the introduction of moral ideas into sacrifice marks a 
great epoch in human thought. The second and third 
stages overlap in history, and they both represent a more 
developed and thought-out belief than the first, in the 
possibility of god and man being more or less mutually 
intelligible. Probably, if heads are counted, these stages 
are more important than any of the others; views of 
these types meet us all over the world both in antiquity 
and today. But the real progress of religion depends on 



8 Robertson Smith, Early Religion of the Semites, p. 396. 

9 lb. p. 401. 
"76. p. 415. 

11 The line is quoted with disapproval by Plato, Rep., Ill, p. 390 E, 
but he does not say who is the poet. It is referred to by Euripides, 
Medea, 964. 



THE LAMB OF GOD 59 

their being transcended. While it is well said that "the 
cultus is the heathen element in Israelite religion," 12 we 
must note the desire to be right with God. From now 
onward even more clearly than before, all progress de- 
pended on the growth of the conception of God. 

The fourth stage, represented among the Hebrews by 
the Prophets, by Plato among the Greeks, shows a start- 
ling development. "Nothing," wrote Professor Bruce, 
"is more remarkable in the prophetic character than an 
exquisite sensitiveness to everything savoring of insin- 
cerity." 18 How profound and searching the prophetic mind 
was, is not quickly realized, till we grasp how persistent 
both in Judaism and outside it were the older views of 
sacrifice. In the latter part of the reign of Jeroboam II 
(about 760-746 B. C.), Amos went to Bethel, and spoke 
the mind of Jehovah on what he saw there; Jehovah 
cried: "I hate, I despise your feasts; I will not smell in 
your solemn assemblies" (Amos 5:21). It is the more 
strange, because Amos says no word in condemnation of 
the idolatry of Bethel. That was left for Hosea, whose 
rendering of Jehovah's feeling about sacrifice was twice 
quoted by Jesus: "I will have mercy and not sacrifice" 
(Hosea 6:6). Isaiah, speaking for Jehovah, says, "I 
delight not in the blood of bulls" (1:11-13). Jeremiah 
more sweepingly says that Jehovah had not spoken about 
sacrifice at all when he made his famous covenant with 
Israel (Jer. 7: 21-22), and he is explicit on the failure of 
the religion of Moses ; a new covenant will have to replace 
the old, a religion within the heart (31:31). The second 
Isaiah (40:16) and some of the Psalmists are as em- 
phatic (Psalms 40:6; 50:8-14). Whether the Prophets 
would have approved of sacrifice if accompanied by 
morality and inward religion, is not the issue ; those who 



12 Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 422. 
"A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, p. 278. 



60 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

wish to reconcile their utterances with a pre-critical view 
of the Pentateuch, may urge that they would have; but 
it is at least clear that for the Prophets sacrifice was 
not in the forefront of religion, while for their contem- 
poraries it was. When a man has once grasped that re- 
ligion is not ritual but mind, when he is a pioneer in this 
belief, it is generally safer to assume that he takes a 
bolder view than the temporizing people who endeavor 
to reconcile old and new and to minimize contrasts. It 
is of interest to note how swiftly the Christian apologists 
seized on these passages in the Prophets, how thoroughly 
alert they were to their real meaning, and how trench- 
antly they used them to prove to the Jew that the age 
of sacrifices was over, and that there was no compromise 
possible any longer on the issue, and, sometimes, that the 
whole association of sacrifice with the religion of Jeho- 
vah had been nothing but a stupid blunder on the part 
of Israel. 14 

Plato was as clear as the Prophets that sacrifice was 
a mistake in religion, that it rested on a wrong view of 
the gods altogether, and that it confused the moral sense. 
"Envy," he said, "stands outside the divine choir." 15 In 
the Laws 19 he signalizes three great errors among men's 
ideas as to the gods: first, the belief that there are no 
gods; second, the concession that there are gods, who 
have, however, no interest in human affairs; third, the 
worst error of all, that there are gods, interested, too, in 
man and his doings, but gods who are easily influ- 
enced by sacrifice. "Quacks and prophets," he says 
elsewhere, 17 "go to rich men's doors and persuade them 
that they have power from the gods, by means of sacri- 
fices and chants, to cure any wrong deed of their own or 



14 Cf. Justin's Trypho; Tertullian, Adv. Jud,; Barnabas. 

13 Plato, Phaedrus, 247 A. 

18 Plato, Laws, x:885. 

17 Plato, Republic, II, 364 A. ff. 



THE LAMB OF GOD 61 

their ancestors in a course of pleasures and feasts"; for 
a human feast with abundant wine accompanied sacrifice 
both in Greece and in Palestine. The Greek world re- 
ceded from the clear thinking of Plato ; the fear of death, 
the spell of the past, the charm of ritual religion, were 
too strong; but Stoics and Epicureans were alike insistent 
that sacrifices served no purpose at all in religion. 18 

The fifth stage is obvious. In Israel, the priests ad- 
justed their theory of sacrifice to the teaching of the 
Prophets, toning down the words of the bolder thinkers, 
as the friends of the obsolete always will. Sacrifice be- 
came symbolic; it was given a moral connotation which 
it had not originally had ; it was by all means to be main- 
tained, while the prophetic warning to cleanse the heart 
was of course important too. The old books were welded 
with the new Priestly Code, and the Pentateuch resulted. 
In this period, as under the Macedonian dynasty, the 
Jews never let history stand between themselves and their 
ancestors; 19 their religion was semper eadem. The correct 
theory was that sacrifice was ordained, and suggested to 
men, directly by God. 20 In the reestablished temple at 
Jerusalem sacrifice was regularly made till Titus de- 
stroyed city and temple in A.D. 70; and it is of interest 
to note who maintained it. The priestly family of Zadok 
gave their name to the Sadducees ; conservative in ritual, 
they were conservative in thought, and repudiated mod- 
ern doctrines of spirit and angel and the soul's eternal 
life. 21 At the same time, they compromised in practice and 
policy with Hellenism and honestly earned by their teach- 
ing and their lives the contempt of good Jews. "They 
could only persuade the rich," says Josephus. 



18 Cf. Seneca, Ep. 95, 47-50. 

19 P. ' Wendla'nd, Hell. Rom. Kultur, pp. 198, 199; Drummond, Philo, 
I, p. 242. 

20 A. B. Davidson, Theol. O. T., p. 311. 

21 Acts 5:17; Josephus, Antt., xviiiil, 4; xiii:10, 6. W. Fairweather, Back- 
ground of Gospels, 149-153. 



62 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

The sixth stage is represented by the religion of the 
synagogue.** The priesthood of Jerusalem had secured 
that sacrifice should only be made in their temple; their 
monopoly was secure; but here, as often, the by-products 
of success were more important. Jews, scattered over 
the world, from Babylon to Italy, unable to maintain the 
practice of three pilgrimages a year to Jerusalem (Deut. 
12:5-11), had to fall back on their own devices for the 
maintenance of their religion and the education of their 
children. The synagogue became their center — a meet- 
ing-house, where a simple form of service grew up, which 
needed no priests. A layman could read aloud the law 
and the prophets ; the psalms were sung ; and exhortation 
was given by those who seemed able to do it. No wonder 
the Sabbath was more Observed by the Dispersion than 
at Jerusalem." How very great an innovation the syna- 
gogue's religion was, is not easily realized without some 
intimate knowledge of ancient conceptions. Vaewam 
sedem et inania arcana is the epigram of Tacitus on the 
Temple itself — a shrine with nothing in it and mysteries 
that were not there. The Judaism of the synagogue 
baffled the ancient world — religion with no image of a 
god, with no altar, no priest, and no sacrifice, was un- 
thinkable; but in the synagogue it existed, and from 
the synagogue came the three living religions of today. 
Titus, with the practical man's failure to grasp what is 
alive, destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple deliberately in 
order to extinguish Judaism. But Judaism survived the 
destruction of the Temple, on which since sacrifice ceased 
to be a real part of its religion, it no longer depended. 24 



32 On the synagogues, see J. P. Peters, Religion of Hebrews, pp. 381- 
404; W. Fairweather, Background of the Gospels, pp. 25 ff.; I. Abrahams, 
Pharisaism and the Gospels, pp. 1 fi\; Josephus, C. Apion, II, 18; Luke 
4:16, 20; Acts 13:15. 

2a Fairweather, Background, p. 10. 

2 * It may be added that the Essene sect disapproved of animal sacrifice; 
Philo, 2:457; Josephus, AntL, 18:1, 5. 



THE LAMB OF GOD 63 

To sum up, sacrifice was a language used by all men, 
but understood by none ; no uniform interpretation could 
be given to it. Its meaning varied with men's thought 
of God. It depended on use and wont ; it was maintained 
most strongly by those who thought least deeply on 
religion. The real thinkers saw that it did not touch the 
problem of sin at all ; it had no effect on God or gods ; it 
could not purify the conscience of man (Heb. 9:9). Sac- 
rifice depended on the instinct that man must give God 
something — a natural outcome of anthropomorphism, the 
danger of which Plato saw. The only real value in sacri- 
fice, whether act or metaphor, lay in the belief that some- 
how God and man could communicate, could be intelli- 
gible; but the clearer thinkers knew of better ways by 
which God and man touched each other. Sacrifice was 
in fact obsolete where real religion was concerned; and 
the stronger minds counted it immoral. 

Ill 

In dealing with the Christian religion, its ideas, and the 
expression given to them, the first thing is to learn the 
mind of Jesus himself. He was a child of the syna- 
gogue ; from boyhood he had the custom of going to the 
synagogue (Luke 4:16), and he was more at home there 
than in the Temple with its grandeurs and its squalors 
(Matt. 21:12, 13; Mark 11:15). It would be significant 
if he, with his genius in religion, his insight and intui- 
tion in all that bears on God, went back from the stage of 
the synagogue to that of the Temple, if he fell short of 
the Prophets. But he does not. He, too, omits sacrifice. 
His teaching centers in another conception of God. "Your 
heavenly Father" has not to be persuaded by your gifts. 
No, it is the other way round ; "It is your Father's good 
pleasure to give you the kingdom." All ancient ritual, 



64 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

all priestly theory of sacrifice and offering, is more than 
ever obsolete when we hear the voice of Jesus. "Your 
heavenly Father" has not to be sought : he is seeking you. 
The good shepherd goes after the lost sheep : he does not 
wait for the lost sheep to find him. The wonder and the 
mystery of God is this, that he wants man infinitely more 
than man wants him, that he makes the offering to man, 
not man to him, that it is man, and not he, who must be 
reconciled. 25 The whole of the New Testament rings with 
that key-note of Jesus. Its writers make no suggestion 
that we have to reconcile God to ourselves. "Be ye recon- 
ciled to God," says Paul (II Cor. 5:20). "We love him 
because he first loved us," says John (I John 4:19). "Be- 
cause he first loves us, afterwards he reconciles us to 
himself," wrote Calvin. 26 In the atmosphere of such 
thoughts there is no place for the blood of bulls and goats, 
symbol or not symbol; and historically Jesus has abol- 
ished sacrifice and banished the ideas that underlie it. 
The metaphor of sacrifice is indeed found in the New 
Testament. It is used because it is a popular way of 
speech, because it is an easy symbol; and yet when one 
tries to define the idea of sacrifice and realizes the essence 
of Jesus' revelation of God, the more alien the two things 
become. The metaphor fails ; the symbol will not do. It 
confuses the issues. The expression with which we 
started, "the Lamb of God," is peculiarly hard to grasp 
with any clear sense of its meaning; it suggests ideas 
but it eludes us. If some of us still love the old phrase- 
ology of sacrifice, it is because it has been filled with new 
meaning and has gathered new associations. But the 
new meaning is too much for the old words; the new 
wine bursts the old skin. The old conception of sacrifice 
makes our relation with God, which is so simple and so 



25 Contrast Apocalypse of Baruch, 84:1ft 
36 Calvin, Institutes, II, 16:3. 



THE LAMB OF GOD 65 

beautiful in the teaching of Jesus, indistinct again; it 
leaves the morality of the affair uncertain and difficult. 
It was never dominant until the adherents of the 
mystery religions, the heathen, came into the Church, 
and brought, by sheer numbers, a conception to bear on 
the teaching of Jesus that was not there at the be- 
ginning. Then the wholesale adoption of the Old Testa- 
ment, and the passion for matching everything in the 
Old with something in the New, and above all the legalism 
brought into the Church by converted Roman lawyers, 
changed the general outlook. 27 Barnabas had held sacrifice 
to have been a mistake from the first; but now the feel- 
ing that all religion must be in some degree sacrificial 
(let us beware, for the moment, of our modern meaning) 
begins to gain ground. At the same time current 
philosophical accounts of God, Neoplatonic in the main, 
were invading the Church, and making God remote and 
august as he had never been in the thought of Jesus. 
Old and obsolete ideas revived, and with the decline of 
the intellectual life of world and Church in the later 
Roman Empire there was little power of resistance. The 
acceptance of the doctrine of the literal inspiration of 
the Old Testament at the Reformation secured the per- 
sistence of the sacrificial idea as necessary to religion, 
till in the nineteenth century anthropology and criticism 
threw open the way for clearer thinking, and the general 
return to the thoughts of Jesus directed the emphasis 
elsewhere. 

IV 

But the New Testament has other accounts of the work 
of Jesus. The writer to the Hebrews, quoting the 
fortieth Psalm, contrasts two clauses, "sacrifice and offer- 



27 On all this, more fully in Chapter X. 



66 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

ing and burnt offerings and offering for sin thou wouldest 
not . . ." and "then said he, Lo, I come to do thy will" ; 
and he insists that the second abrogates the whole scheme 
of sacrifices. "By which will," he continues, "we are 
sanctified, by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ 
once for all" (Heb. 10:5-10). With a clearness and 
definition which are not always recognized by his readers, 
he sweeps aside metaphor and symbol, and speaks things. 
"The law," he says, "had a shadow of good things to 
come, and not the exact image of them." One guesses 
that in his mind is some memory of Plato's cave with 
the men bound there, who see not things, not even models 
of them, but the shadows of models, and live prisoners 
in a world of shadows. The old law of sacrifice and ritual 
offered not even an image of the real; it was at best a 
shadow of an image. So he moves away from analogy to 
psychology, from the >- T mbol to the person. We must 
try to follow him. 

Jesus died, he says, to put away sin by the sacrifice of 
himself. What did he do ? He identified himself with the 
will of God, and by so doing cast such a flood of light on 
it as transfigured it. He prayed in Gethsemane what he 
taught his disciples to pray: "Thy will be done." That 
lies at the heart of all Christian prayer; it is the center 
of the Christian life; and, suggests our writer, it is 
the center of the life and work of Jesus. He suggests 
that, in a wonderful way, a way past our grasp, Jesus 
and the will of God are identified, and that everything 
which Jesus did is brought about by that identification 
of himself with the will of God. There is hardly an 
author of the New Testament who has such a haunting 
sense of what it cost Jesus — prayer, suffering, tempta- 
tion, agony, and, as he says, strong crying. We do not 
easily grasp the reality and the range of his sacrifice 
of himself. "He learnt by what he suffered" (Heb. 5:8), 



THE LAMB OF GOD 67 

we read, and we think of Greek tragedy and its interpre- 
tations of suffering, and we remember the width of cul- 
ture of our author. He has got clear away from the 
world of shadows into the region of fact and experience, 
into the inner life of Jesus, the very being of God. If 
we fail here and do not get things clear, it is because 
we are not deep enough, or true enough, or enough Chris- 
tian, to see and to speak of things like this; but let us 
try to see what he means. 

When he speaks of the will of God, he means substan- 
tially what we should call the nature of God. The will 
is the expression of the real, the deepest, nature. It is 
God at the most definite, the most essential. The writer 
suggests, then, that Jesus and the will of God interpret 
each other; that in Jesus, in his life and mind and death, 
we read the mind and life of God, the will and nature of 
God; that in Jesus God is made intelligible to us and 
becomes our own, ours because we see and understand. 
Roberts Browning says in his Fra Lippo: 

"We're made so that we love 
First when we see them painted, things we have passed 
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see." 

The interpretation calls our attention to the thing, and 
changes our feeling; it ceases to be foreign to us. Men 
had known the will of God, as they called it, but they 
had not loved it. They saw it from without; they con- 
ceived of God as a hard, alien, external force, and they 
shuddered and shrank from him. They had no point of 
approach, and he remained inscrutable; and the very 
fact of his being unintelligible made him awful. The 
arbitrariness of God haunted their minds with terror; it 
was indeed the source of the fear that drove them to 
sacrifice beasts to God, yes, and their own children; it 
was a thing of horror and pain. But Jesus takes the 



68 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

will of God, and interprets it, and makes it, with all its 
mystery, a new thing : he brings us to see it in the light 
of his own experience. He teaches us to find in God's 
nature something akin to his own nature, something, 
therefore, that we can accept and trust, and by-and-by 
may love. If we may again use Plato's parable of the 
cave, Jesus has brought us out in the open air, where 
we no longer have to be content with shadows of images, 
but we see things in the sunshine of God. We have 
our faces turned the other way altogether; we are in 
the atmosphere of God; and when your eyes adjust them- 
selves a little to the new blaze of light, we look more and 
more into the reality of things. The writer to the 
Hebrews, in a later chapter, puts it that Jesus has 
brought us into the very presence of God (10:19, with 
9:24). 

In the ancient religions of sacrifice, men put them- 
selves right with God by bargain, and gift, by getting 
safely away from God, by inducing God to go away from 
them, or alternatively, by sharing with God a meal, at 
first merely physical and later on magical, which allowed 
the sensation of a semi-physical union with God. Jesus 
has done the thing by bringing us nearer than ever 
before to God, into the very heart and mind of God. It 
makes all life utterly different. It means rethinking all 
moral and religious ideas in a full view of God as he is, 
and working everything out on the lines of the heavenly 
Father's nature as interpreted by Jesus in his life and, 
above all, in his death. A new life, a new world, new 
men and women, the taking away of sin — all was made 
possible by the work of Jesus, by his intense unity with 
God, by the evidence of this given to us in his death. 
Old modes of religious thought ceased to be possible for 
men who had any real experience of Jesus; the tradi- 
tional paled before the real; the shadows fled. 



THE LAMB OF GOD 69 

As the death of Jesus grows in significance, men are 
driven again and again to ask who he was, that he should 
achieve so great a change in the relations of God and 
man. The question is a great one; it is not to be solved 
till we know in some inward way something of the mys- 
tery of the identity of his mind with God's mind, till we 
realize the outcome of it all in the history of man, and, 
above all, till we know for ourselves the love of Jesus. 
Men speak easily of the love of Jesus; but we do not 
deeply know it. How could we? How far does the un- 
trained eye see the wonder of anything? How can we, 
with our coldness of heart, our hardness and triviality, 
understand the love of Jesus? But it touches us, and 
it has touched mankind; and it becomes intelligible to 
man in that death, in which Jesus identified himself with 
the will of God. The love of Jesus and the will of God 
lighting each other up — that has been the essence of the 
Gospel. A modern German Jew has said that suffering 
is a language that everybody understands; the poorest 
intellect knows some of its meaning, the highest and 
the clearest has still something to learn of it. That is 
the language that Jesus used, and we understand him 
there without a commentary. Jesus shows us that it is 
also the language of God, that suffering is not, as the 
ancients alleged, and as some light-hearted moderns also 
say, alien to God, but something peculiarly God's own, 
that the cross instead of being, as the early anti-Christian 
controversialists urged, the very antithesis of God's na- 
ture, is in the very heart of God somewhere. So God 
also becomes intelligible to men in the cross; his will 
becomes something we can grasp and understand and 
approve, something that we can obey with joy, something 
that changes the values of life. 

The statement, attributed by the Fourth Gospel to 
John the Baptist, that "the Lamb of God taketh away 



70 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

the sin of the world" has historically been justified. 
There is plenty of sin in the world today; but we have 
only to read history to realize the disappearance of a 
great deal of sin, public and private. There were forms 
of sin, which, as men lived themselves into the meaning 
of the death of Jesus, they would have no more. A 
society, more and more penetrated by the intelligence of 
Jesus, could not endure to have slavery continue; the 
atrocious usage of women went; the killing of babies 
went ; and many other like things have gone, and the rest 
will go. 28 For today, where the will of God, as interpreted 
by Jesus, is real, where people have come near to Jesus, 
they catch his Spirit and see things as he sees them; 
they grow conscious of the call to a higher level; they 
become sensitive to the suffering of others; they find 
themselves involved in a great change of life, a thor- 
ough rethinking of the principles on which they live — a 
change swift, impulsive, and instinctive in some, slow, 
deliberate, and carefully thought out in others; but real 
in both. It means sin taken out of men's lives, new 
principles of living given, and a new motive in life, a 
new passion; a new power, a new life — God in short. 
It is all associated with the realization of Jesus. What 
the old religion, with its clumsy and vague attempts to 
reach God, could not do, has been done in human experi- 
ence by Jesus. 

It is not out of the way, then, that the Apocalypse pic- 
tures the victorious Christ as the Lamb slain, and again 
and again associates his victory over sin and evil with 
his death, and to his death ascribes the purity and beauty 
of all the white-robed souls that he has redeemed. 



» This matter will be resumed in Chapter XIII. 



CHAPTER V 
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 

Luther once said that the forgiveness of sin is nodus 
Deo vindice dignus, a knot that it needs a God's help to 
unravel. Whether we consider forgiveness as a practical 
or as an intellectual problem, he was right. As with 
other matters of real import the difficulties only unfold 
themselves when we try to solve them ; at the first blush 
most things that matter are simpler than we find them 
on closer acquaintance. If sin and its forgiveness occupy 
a far less place in contemporary thinking than they once 
did, it is perhaps as much due to shallowness as to sanity. 
To neglect one's bodily health is not much wiser than to 
fidget about it; quiet thinking about health or sin never 
hurt any man. 

The poet of Job was a man who loved this t glorious 
world — 

"The beauty and the wonder and the power, 

The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades, 

Changes, surprises — and God made it all!' 



i" 



"When the morning stars sang together, and all the 
sons of God shouted for joy" (Job 38:7). Three or 
four hundred years after him, another poet of his race — a 
poet who saw cloudily and in symbol at times, and at 
other times with extraordinary vividness — "saw a new 
heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the 
first earth were passed away . . . and he that sat upon 
the throne said, Behold! I make all things new" (Rev. 

71 



72 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

21:1, 5). Nothing but a new creation would serve; the 
world he had known was impossible; let it pass. 

The contrast between these two views of the world 
sums up a great deal of human experience. With all 
its charm and wonder, there is something wrong with 
the world, and the deepest and tenderest natures have 
felt it most. 

"Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest 
thought." 

A close attention to humanity brings the mind at once 
to conduct — to conduct as the index of spirit; and men 
have been driven in spite of themselves to wrestle with 
the problem of evil. 

I 

It would be a long story to trace the growth of the 
idea of sin. The records of our race show how, in 
thinking of sin, men have steadily shifted from the 
external to the internal. In all man's thought upon 
life and upon society that transition is to be seen. 
More and more stress has been laid upon motive, upon 
the reactive effect of action, and upon spirit and its 
changes. Morality his grown more reflective, and man 
more self-conscious and more individual. Taboos live 
long, but they too are judged by reason. It has been 
a long, slow process; and in the end man acquits the 
accident and the external of his sin, and brings himself 
in guilty. We watch the man in Plato's Republic wres- 
tling with the lust of his eyes to gaze greedily on the 
bodies of the criminals put to death; the fight is within 
him, and in anger at himself he yields to himself. 1 In 
the Gorgias, as we have seen, 3 Plato goes further and 
tells us how sin writes itself indelibly upon the soul of 



1 Republic, IV:439 E, 440 A. 2 Chapter II, p. 25. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 73 

the sinner. Still more significant were the contributions 
of Hebrew prophets and psalmists to clear thinking upon 
sin. If the Greek brought out that the man who sins, 
sins against Nature and against his own soul, the Hebrew, 
with his clearer conception of God's personality, grasped 
a still more central fact. Isaiah's vision of God is imme- 
diately followed by his confession of sin (Isaiah 6), and 
the words of the Psalmist are familiar: 

"I know my transgressions : 

And my sin is ever before me. 

Against thee, thee only, have I sinned." — (Psalm 51 :3, 4) 

Commentators with a gust for the obvious like to point 
out the exaggeration in this confession, whether the 
psalm is David's and refers to Uriah and his wife, or 
whether it is a more universal story, the utterance of 
an unknown thinker. Exaggeration — but, in the depths 
of it, truth. 

In the new and strange world that Alexander the 
Great made, the supreme teachers of the Greek world 
were the Stoics, and their main interest lay in ethics. 
Bishop Lightfoot well called their new-coined word Con- 
science ((ruvetS^o-ts) "the crowning triumph of ethical 
nomenclature." 8 Another great contribution was irpoatpeo-ts 
(purpose or motive). They recognized motive as the 
key to morality, while in the older religions, especially 
the Roman, emphasis fell on act. The change is revo- 
lutionary. In Judaism there is a cleavage; for some 
Jews sin assumed a growing importance, while on others, 
as we shall see, it sat lightly enough. 

It is interesting to reflect on the processes by which 
the gains of man's knowledge have been gathered. The 
modern is so apt to associate religion with morality, that 
it is something of a shock to be told how little priest 



• Commentary on Philippians, p. 301. 



74 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

and cult and temple contributed to ethical progress, 
either in Greece or in Israel. While it may foe true, as 
Andrew Lang urged, that in no race have religious cere- 
monies been unaccompanied by moral teaching, still the 
priest has rarely been much of a thinker, rarely a pioneer 
in ethics ; his business passed into his soul, and his busi- 
ness lay with old rules, with established forms, with the 
practice of older days. Prophet in Israel, philosopher 
in Greece, were laymen, men of problems and questions — 
spiritual anarchists or spiritual reconstructionists, as 
you chose to regard them; men who cared nothing for 
settled thought and accepted usage, but who drove hard 
at fact, would have principle, and must base all on the 
fundamental. But long before the philosophers and the 
prophets whose names we know, there were others who 
lifted the thinking and feeling of mankind forward, 
men who groped their way to truth, vita didicere magis- 
tra, felt the pressure of life and built their laws out of 
experience. These men, slow-thinking, but very sure, 
were the fathers of the philosophers, their brothers and 
their best disciples. 

But, valid and beyond price as the contributions of 
Plato and the Stoics were, and the contributions of 
Prophet and Psalmist, a great deal was left to achieve. 
They settled a great many points. Sin is violation of 
Nature's laws; it is more damaging to the sinner than 
to his victim; 4 it is at last rebellion against God. So 
much was gained, and remains gained; Isaiah and Plato 
have much to say to the most modern of us; they are 
not superseded. But Jesus transformed the whole situa- 
tion by revealing the character and personality of God 
and by bringing into the range of discussion a man's 
neighbor and society at large, as the immediate interests 
of God. He did this partly by what he said, a great deal 



* Plato, Crito, 49. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 75 

more by what he was. "To overlook or to underrate the 
influence which has been exercised upon moral develop- 
ment by great personalities has been a too frequent 
tendency of philosophical Ethics." 6 Personality itself has 
again and again been the revelation that has superseded 
tradition. The Cross was a stimulus to rethink sin ; and 
it remains so. The teaching of Jesus made previous 
thinkers seem shallow; they had handled far too easily 
the relation of man to God; their morality, sound and 
true to Nature as far as it went, was not thought out 
deeply enough; their psychology — this is a bold thing 
to say, when one remembers to whom one is referring — 
was not sufficient, too many factors were lost. But the 
Cross carried things further; it became in itself the 
source of "conviction of sin" ; men by it saw further into 
the love of God and into the meaning of their own sin 
than ever before. Put into modern terms, clumsy and 
ugly enough, sin is the exploitation of man, the using 
of the gifts of God against God, the negation of God, 
the repudiation in toto of God's love, of the personal, 
throbbing, fathomless Fatherhood of that God whom 
Jesus revealed. "Sin," as Neville Talbot has put it, 
"sin, as the wilful devotion to self of those who are made 
for Another and for others, is the central and root 
tragedy of life." 

If we are to discuss the forgiveness of sin, we have 
to be clear with ourselves as to what we mean both by 
sin and by forgiveness. If Bernard Shaw tells us bluntly 
that there is no forgiveness of sin, while the early creed 
will have us say daily: "I believe . . . the forgiveness of 
sins," supposing that the playwright and the early the- 
ologian mean the same thing, it is plain that they are 
contradicting each other. That is possibly Mr. Shaw's 
intention. The matter is not settled by either of them, 



B Hastings Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, p. 21. 



76 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

nor would it be if they agreed or thought they agreed. 
What does forgiveness imply? How much of sin can be 
forgiven? Do we distinguish between sin and sins? 
What should forgiveness effect, then, if we do so dis- 
tinguish? 

II 

We may begin by considering three aspects of sin 
which can be readily recognized. If sin is primarily 
a record, can that record be deleted? But it is never 
merely a record; there is also what St. Augustine called 
"the violence of habit"; 9 can a habit be "forgiven," or 
would it be altered if it were forgiven? In the third 
place, apart from the record of a man's sins, and his 
habit of sin, a sinful act of his may have contaminated 
another man's springs of judgment and conduct; granted 
that his habit of sin may be overcome, that the record of 
his own acts may be somehow deleted, how can he have 
peace, and how can belief in justice be secure, if the 
influence of his act remain operative in the life of an- 
other? There are at least three problems here, none of 
them easy. 

First, then, the record. Men are always haunted by 
the consciousness that a thing done remains done. How- 
ever much they repent, however pure and great and 
valuable their lives have become — "Well, he was in prison 
for forgery, and she did have an illegitimate child ; there 
is no getting past that ; those things cannot be undone." 
So the commonplace always think, inside the Church and 
out of it. So, too, say the religious teachers, the hymn- 
writers — 



6 Augustine, Confessions, viii:5, 12: "Lex enim peccati est violentia conswe- 
tudinis qua trahitur et tenetur etiam invitus animus, eo merito quo in 
earn illabitur" 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 77 

"Liber scriptus proferetur." 

So, too, the Bible, "The dead were judged out of the 
things which were written in the books, according to 
their works (Rev. 20:12). 7 So, too, says conscience. 8 
Actions, deeds, are done and remain. Memory cannot 
abolish itself; remorse is there, furious resentment 
against oneself for the folly that led to sin against one- 
self, that robbed oneself of the clean page and the 
pleasure which the clean page means. Remorse is essen- 
tially self-centered ; it has little relation to others. Where 
God comes into the reckoning, there is an added horror, a 
sense very native to the human mind that the record has 
alienated God. If remorse is impersonal and does not 
regard others, this is very personal ; God has been turned 
into an enemy. By now, if time makes an interpretation 
valid, the Christian Church has said this often enough; 
but it is not historically the view of Jesus, it is one of 
the ideas he died to abolish. 

If the unthinking forgive sin easily, the thoughtful 
do not; they reckon hardly with themselves. Even if 
"Ihe full and self-consistent concept of sin" implies, as 
Dr. Tennant says, knowledge, will, and intention — if 
without these, it be not sin — still ignorant acts involve 
consequences ; ignorance traps a man into disease physi- 
cally; and morally — ? Greek tragedy shows, painfully 
enough, that in a great man's estimate of his record and 
of himself, his ignorant action counts. Human law will 
not admit the plea of ignorance; Nature's law does not 
admit it; will God's law allow it? Does a deep-going 
man forgive himself his own ignorance? What right has 
he to be ignorant? The child dies, because the mother 



7 The simile is in Daniel 7:10; and in other apocalyptic books. It 
occurred independently to the Greeks, some of whom ridiculed it — Zeus 
would not have material for books enough; Euripides, Melanippe, fr. 
506, Nauck. 

8 Cf. Wisdom, 17:11; if the text is right. 



78 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

did not know; "I ought to have known," she says, and 
she is right; the child was given to her that she might 
know for it. But it is an insufficient view of sin that 
emphasizes the deed, and it means loss of proportion. 
The motive is of more import; it is more real and more 
formative. 

Second we set the "violence of habit." Motive, atti- 
tude, taste, make instinct, and instinct gives a turn to 
habit and that to character. It was remarked in an- 
tiquity, and Burns among others of modern times has 
also remarked, that one effect of sin is a change of char- 
acter. "Each one of us," said the Hebrew, "has been 
the Adam of his own soul." "Whatever the mental pic- 
tures you often make, to that color your mind (Siaroia) 
comes; the mind is dyed by its pictures," writes Marcus 
Aurelius (V:16). And Burns: 

"But, oh, it hardens all within 
And petrifies the feeling." 

R. L. Stevenson in his Christmas sermon spoke of the 
danger of defiling the imagination. The New Testament 
abounds with similar observations; St. Paul has a series 
of metaphors all drawn from the physical senses — "the 
heart darkened" (Rom. 1:21) and "darkened in mind" 
(Siavoax, Eph. 4:18) ; the mind and the conscience stained 
(Titus 1:15), and the conscience cauterized (I Tim. 4:2). 
Cumulatively the pictures suggest a mind cut off from 
reality — all the channels of communication blocked, and 
all that is transmitted falsified in the process; the whole 
is summed up in a striking phrase, vovs aSoVt/tios (Rom. 
1:28), a mind unfit for its proper functions. "This is 
the condemnation," writes John (3:19), "that men love 
darkness rather than light." Much has been said and 



8 Apocalypse of Baruch, 54:19. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 79 

written in our days of the subconscious mind and of the 
subliminal self, and it is remarked how ideas or at least 
impressions can be stored in that subconscious mind, 
which are never lost but, after years of utter forgetful- 
ness, may be somehow flung into the conscious mind, 
vivid, horrible, and defiling. There are no "dead selves," 
they are living in death, potent and septic. So far 
modern analysis supports the insight of Jesus that from 
within comes what defiles a man (Mark 7:15). There 
is no horror like that of the mind finding in odd moments 
of self-discovery what it has made of itself, learning in 
awful revelations what things memory and imagination 
can accumulate for its perversion. Bunyan pictures the 
Pilgrim in the Valley of the Shadow of Death hearing 
fiends whisper blasphemies in his ears and supposing the 
voice of evil to be his own thought. If Bunyan says ex- 
plicitly that the voice came from without, the modern 
psychologist is not so certain. It is experience that be- 
tween impulse and act there is an interval in which in- 
hibition may be effective, but that with surrender to evil 
that interval becomes shorter and shorter. A man may 
come at last to be the prey of his own past, a creature 
of reflex actions, for which, however, he is himself re- 
sponsible, even if by now they are involuntary and repul- 
sive to himself, the regular victim of a habit which he 
developed by surrender to it. 10 A man is responsible for 
what he has made of his own mind and personality; but 
the vital question is, What can undo what he has done? 
In the third place, sin was long ago compared to disease 
by Plato (in the Gorgias). The comparison is illuminat- 
ing, and it was used in passing by Jesus. But if a man 



19 R. L. Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde draws the picture of 
Tekyll waking and eeeing with horror the hand of Edward Hyde on th^ 
bed; "I had gone to bed Henry Jckyl), I had awakened Edward Hyde. 
How was this to be explained?" Readers will, perhaps, associate odd 
revivals of the forgotten with the moment of waking. 



80 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

is to be pitied for a disease from which he suffers, two 
questions arise: How did he incur it, and has he trans- 
mitted it? What are we to make of the effects of our 
characters in the lives and minds and personalities of 
others? If a man of great gifts neglects or misuses 
them as a result of my influence, if he turns them into 
instruments of corruption, what becomes of that other 
lost soul and its powers, used for evil, even if mine is 
recovered for God and man? Forgiveness, if it is to be 
real and complete, has surely to cover this third aspect 
of sin. 

Ill 

Many methods have been tried to meet the case of 
sin. Neglect of it as negligible has been suggested as 
if it were as good a course as any. Sir Oliver Lodge 
has said, apparently with some satisfaction, that the 
modern man has not time to think about his sins. 11 If 
sin is a serious thing at all, it is a pity the modern man 
should be so short of time. Much stress was laid in 
antiquity, and some since then, on moral endeavor. The 
Stoic sage bade a man examine himself, confess his sins 
to his conscience, forgive them, and then do better." 
Jewish legalism reached a similar result. But every- 
thing here depends on a man's conception of God and 
of God's standards; if it is not very high, he may easily 
satisfy himself; but if it be a high one, if it be continu- 
ally expanded with new glimpses of God, then new visions 
of duty break in upon him, and he concludes, sometimes 
in blank despair: 

"Not the labors of my hands 
Can fulfil Thy law's demands." 



11 Quoted by Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, p. 130. 

12 Seneca, De Ira, 3:36, 1-4; Epictetus, D. 3:10. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 81 

In any case endeavor in the present could not undo the 
past. The Stoic quite frankly despaired of some people. 
"Natta," said the young Stoic poet, "is stupid with vice; 
his heart is overgrown with fat ; he feels no reproach ; he 
knows not what he is losing." 13 "What is to be done," 
asked Epictetus, 14 "if a man be hardened to stone?" In 
Judaism Paul shows how despair overtook men who gave 
themselves to the endeavor to build up their own right- 
eousness (Phil. 3:6, 9) and were serious about it — "O 
wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this 
death?" (Rom. 7:24). Paul also speaks of God "giving 
up" men to the reprobate mind (Rom. 1:28) and evil 
passions, though this does not necessarily imply finality. 
Celsus has little hope of quite mending those who "sin 
by nature and sin by habit." 15 But can despair be a right 
conclusion in God's universe? Here again all turns on 
our conception of God. Expiation is another means of 
dealing with sin, which depends on the same conception. 
It at least contains a recognition of the principle of 
justice, and assigns a meaning to punishment. Punish- 
ment has been held to reveal the nature of what is pun- 
ished; in this case it is education, and we exclude the 
unjust and devilish idea of it as mere vengeance. But 
if one is not careful, the very means taken to do away 
with sin may strengthen its hold ; expiation may itself be 
immoral or not sufficiently moral, at any rate as regards 
the chain of influence set in movement by sin, unless God 
is really recognized in the whole transaction for what 
he is. How can a man make reparation to God, if he 
has not a proper recognition of God's nature? Still more, 
how can he, if he has? It was suggested, as we saw, in 
Plato's Republic that some people even reckoned on mak- 



"Persius 3:32. 

"Epiotetus, D., 1:5. 

16 Origen, c. Celsum, 3:65. 



82 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

ing friends of the gods out of the spoils of injustice. 
Judaism developed another idea, valid and funda- 
mental if properly conceived, repentance. "There is 
nothing about repentance in Aristotle, not very much in 
Plato; more no doubt in the teaching of the Stoics, 
though the proud self-sufficiency of that school hardly 
favors a penitential attitude of mind." 18 The absence of 
any definite and operative conviction of God's personality 
probably explains the slight interest of the Greek in re- 
pentance." Among the Jews we find the doctrine taking 
different forms. Mr. Claude Montefiore, in his book 
Pharisaism and St. Paul, explains the standpoint of the 
Rabbinic Jew, using documents of a rather later date 
than Paul's period, but assuring us that we may safely 
use them to reconstruct Paul's milieu. 1 " A few quota- 
tions will make it plain. Rabbinic Judaism was "a happy, 
spiritual and even ardent religion" of the "healthy- 
minded" (p. 48). "The Rabbinic Jew . . . took a prac- 
tical view of the situation" (p. 40) ; "the law had been 
given for life . . . [It] is not in one sense too hard for 
him. There is no commandment which he cannot fulfil 
more or less" (p. 41). "Yes, God ... is very angry," 
but "let a man repent but a very little and God will for- 
give very much" (p. 42). "The average and decent- 
living Israelite would inherit the world to come, would 
be 'saved'" (p. 35). "God's love for Israel, his love of 
the repentant sinner, his inveterate tendency to forgive- 
ness, 19 together with the merits of the patriarchs, 30 would 



19 Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, p. 129. 

17 Perhaps it is not fanciful to see in the Greek term for sin (A/ie/m'a, 
"missing" the mark) another suggestion of this idea that sin hardly con- 
cerns God. 

18 Confirmation is to be found in some of the Apocalyptic books. Cf. 
R. H. Charles, Apocalypse of Baruch, p. 81 ff. 

19 Compare a beautiful passage in Wisdom 11:23-26. 

30 Cf. Apocalypse of Baruch, 84:10. "Pray . . . that the Mighty 
One may be reconciled to you and that He may not reckon the multitude 
of your sins, but remember the rectitude of your others." Cf. ib. 14:7, 
12, "a store of works." 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 83 

amply make up for their own individual deficiencies. 
Their religion was therefore happy and hopeful" (p. 36). 
"Salvation was the privilege of every Israelite, who, 
believing in God and in his law, tried to do his best and 
was sorry for his failures and lapses" (pp. 77, 78). The 
God of the Rabbis was "very personal and childlike. He 
did not care for system and theories, but he was always 
there when wanted" (p. 95) ; a his people, too, had "little 
philosophy" (p. 79) . 

There was another type of Judaism which has histori- 
cally had more influence, the Judaism of the Dispersion, 
of men battling more nakedly with the world, with pagan- 
ism, and with the higher thought of the Greeks. Mr. 
Montefiore finds it "inferior" (p. 93), "more anxious and 
pessimistic, more sombre and perplexed" (p. 114). It 
had suffered from contact with the Greek spirit, and 
"began to invent theories and justifications of its reli- 
gion instead of accepting it as a delightful matter of 
course" (p. 96). "Directly you have to justify a thing, 
it becomes a little external. ... If you accept ... as a 
matter of course, you love it without asking why" (p. 99). 
So the Jew of the Dispersion was "more theoretic and 
systematic, but his outlook on life was less accurate and 
less sensible" (p. 96). 

I have given Mr. Montefiore's own words, because I 
do not wish to misrepresent, and because he is the expert 
and I am not. But the impression they leave on my 
mind is not quite what he intends. The naivete of the 
Rabbinic Jew does not seem to me a higher thing than 
the more difficult and reflective religion of the Dispersion. 
It is too like the common sense and the simplicity which 
we find in other fields and there recognize to be the result 
of mere inattention. Paul's religion was, as Mr. Monte- 



21 See Oesterley and Box, Religion and Worship of the Synagogue, pp. 
391-403, on the Day of Atonement. 



84 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

fiore says, quite different from that which he describes; 
but surely it was not of a lower type, unless the philos- 
opher, who aims with Plato at the "contemplation of all 
time and of all existence," 22 is inferior to the man who 
has not begun to think or who has abruptly dropped the 
habit. Things are not simple in God's universe. To be 
unconscious of difficulties is not to be above them. If 
this is to defy the common sense of the "man in the 
street," I cannot help it. In any case, Rabbinic Judaism 
did not, historically, capture the world; it did not hold 
the reflective Jews of the Dispersion; and the reason is 
not far to seek — it managed everything too easily, "healed 
the hurt of the daughter of my people lightly, saying, 
Peace, peace; when there is no peace. ,,28 

IV 

Jesus is reported by the Fourth Gospel to have said 
that the Holy Spirit would convince the world of sin 
(16:9). Rabbinic Judaism did no such thing. Super- 
stitious and magical as they largely were, the mystery- 
cults of the heathen were nearer the truth about sin. 
Jesus with the Rabbis emphasized repentance, but he 
touched nothing that he did not deepen. He gave men a 
new clue to the force and meaning of sin; he brought 
them to a new sense of repentance. Repentance, as 
Luther saw when he began in earnest the study of 
Greek, means above all things "rethinking." A man must 
have some idea of what his sin means to God, of what 
it means in the human milieu. In order to do this, he 
must have some conviction of God. The knowledge of 
God will be more fully dealt with in the next chapter. It 
is enough here to recall how Jesus re-created the very 
idea of God for men, and this made possible a real re- 



32 Republic, VI:486 a. 
2S Jeremiab 6:14. 8:11. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 85 

thinking of life and conduct. The cross gave men a new 
object-lesson in the nature of sin and the outcome of it, 
showed it in its hideousness, for the cruel, vulgar, and 
negative thing it is. Some realization of God, his law, 
his nature, has always been the prelude of repentance 
properly so named, though it is also true that penitence 
in its fullness is a Christian grace, which grows by 
knowledge of Jesus. 

But our problem is the work of Jesus in dealing with 
sin, and we shall do best to follow the lines laid down 
already. How has Jesus affected the mind of mankind 
with regard to the record, the habit, and the influence 
of sin? 

First, once more, the record. Something is needed, as 
the writer to the Hebrews says, that "will clean your 
conscience." It is conscience that makes cowards of us 
all; if conscience blushes, Tertullian said, prayer blushes 
too. 24 There is no coming to God, if conscience says we 
shall not be welcome. It is a question of balance, or 
perspective, as we like to put it. There stands the record ; 
we conclude that it is intolerable to God, that it alienates 
God. Jesus distinguishes ; he 'brought out the hatef ulness 
of sin to God, he never minimized it, his Passion empha- 
sized it; but he put in the center of his teaching his 
conviction that sin does not alienate God from the child 
whom he loves. As we have seen already, 25 Jesus always 
takes the line that the Father wants his son above all 
things. The prodigal wastes the old man's substance in 
the strange land; but it is not the substance (nor an 
I.O.U. for it) that the old man wants; he wants his boy, 
because he is his boy and needs a father's care and love. 
Jesus never suggests that he is effecting any change in 
moral law, any dislocation, legal fiction, or dodge of any 
kind. His emphasis is not on acts done, on guilt or on 



24 Tertullian, De exhort, castitatis, 10. 25 Chapter IV. p. 64. 



86 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

penalty incurred; it is not on law, nor on God's majesty 
and the vindication of majesty and law; he does not 
deny or in reality obscure these things, but for him the 
matter of first significance is the love of God. 

The record remains, but the sting is taken out of it; 
the forgiven son leaves off thinking of his record, 8 * he 
is more impressed by his father's feeling for him, and 
if he thinks of the record, it becomes itself of new value 
for it enhances the wonder of his reception. "To anyone 
who really experiences it," says Herrmann," "forgiveness 
comes not as a matter of course, but as an astounding 
revelation of love." (The contrast here with the ideas 
of the Rabbinic Jew as set forth by his advocate is 
patent, and it is significant). Christ, as Zwingli saw, 
sets men free from the sense of condemnation by reveal- 
ing not only the divine justice and horror of sin, but 
also the divine mercy and love; he removes the barrier 
which prevents God and man from falling into each 
other's arms. 88 The barrier is of man's building, the 
honest structure that conscience builds as a prison about 
him; but conscience too needs educating and pitches the 
love of God too low. Jesus changes that; he is himself 
the guarantee for God, the pledge of God's love. The 
consequence is a great change of mind in the man. He 
moves over to God's point of view. He no longer wishes 
to escape the consequences of his actions. If the Father 
of Jesus makes a law, the man will now wish at all costs 
to maintain it, he will cooperate to the extent of wishing 
to bear the penalty that his Father thinks helpful to 
him and to others. But is this forgiveness? If the 
penalty is still to be borne? But what is the penalty, when 



»Cf. Luther: "If thou wilt confess sin, then have a care that thtou 
lookest and thinkest far more on thy future life than on thy paat life." 
Herrmann, Communion of Christian with God, p. 255. 

** Herrmann, ib., p. 251. 

« See A. V. G. Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, pp. 289-290. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 87 

once there is reconciliation? Is it a punishment if you 
wish it? Let him do what he will! The crop sown 
has to be reaped; but Another will help in the reaping; 
and it is something to work along with such a Friend even 
in so painful and humiliating a task. And it is man's 
experience that in this work, as in all work done for God 
and with God, the great Friend does the larger part. 
If Jesus is right about God, punishment is not vindictive ; 
it is remedial, 29 and justice is love. "Though he slay me, 
yet will I trust in him." 30 When one grasps the inward- 
ness of Christian thought and experience here, the lan- 
guage used so often in the past about one's own righteous- 
ness being filthy rags 31 becomes quickly intelligible; Zin- 
zendorf, following Paul and John, is right, when we un- 
derstand what he means : 

"Jesu, thy blood and righteousness 
My beauty are, my glorious dress ; 
'Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed, 
With joy shall I lift up my head." 

We may very well use other words and other symbols ; but 
he too has caught the truth. The cross has lit up the real 
nature of God ; the love that chose it becomes the supreme 
thing; the record is not ignored, but its paralyzing effect 
is gone; the conscience is set free to enjoy God and all 
his dealings. Rothe, as rendered by John Wesley, sums 
up the experience : 

"O love, thou bottomless abyss! 

My sins are swallowed up in thee; 
Covered is my unrighteousness, 

Nor spot of guilt remains in me, 
While Jesu's blood through earth and skies 
Mercy, free boundless mercy, cries." 



29 Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Strom., 6:6, 46: "The punishments of 
God are saving and educative"; referring to the punishment of the dead. 

30 Job 13:15 (A.V.). 31 Cf . Isaiah 64:6 (A.V.). 



88 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

Secondly, the power of sin. During the long Euro- 
pean war, and especially towards its end, all the world 
realized, as Napoleon had said, that morale is everything. 
Spirit is the source of victory. Jesus, as we have seen, 
floods the human soul with an intense conviction of the 
love of God; and the man shouts in sheer joy: "I can 
do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me" 
(Phil. 4: 13). This has been put in a variety of ways, all 
pointing to the same experience. Dr. Chalmers spoke of 
"the expulsive power of a new affection," an illustration 
from human life which goes a long way. "Every one who 
knows what it is to be forgiven," wrote Dr. Denney, 
"knows also that forgiveness is the greatest regenerative 
force in the life of man." 33 "The spirit of life in Christ," 
said Paul (and we had better take pains to give the real 
value to the words he chose), "set me free from the law 
of sin and death" (Rom. 8:2). Charles Wesley says the 
same, as forcibly: 

"He breaks the power of cancelled sin, 
He sets the prisoner free." 

St. Augustine gives a further hint. We love more, he 
says, a possession that we have lost and found again than 
if we had never lost it. 83 A new tie of common experi- 
ence binds the good shepherd to the sheep he has found, 
and would bind the sheep to the shepherd if sheep were 
susceptible of such feelings. Men transcend sheep here ; 
memory gives a new motive, and the common experi- 
ence of which Christ and the soul share the secret has a 
power of transmuting the minus to a plus, with a force 
that overcomes the reflex of habit. As for the subliminal 
self and its power of storing dead selves with their hor- 
rible reminders and influences, the Author of the sub- 



sa Denney, Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, p. 6. 
83 Augustine, Confessions, VIII :3, 7. 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 89 

liminal self may be trusted to purify that self also; for 
the idea that God leaves things half done has never 
found acceptance with real thinkers. Christ will descend 
into that hell at least, whatever we say about the Apostles' 
Creed; and when he has made it full of himself, what 
it throws up into the conscious may be trusted to be 
sweet and wholesome. Human love has this effect — 
changing the innermost character and instincts and stor- 
ing impulses for good. 

All this, be it noted, is not conjecture; it is the experi- 
ence men have had of Jesus, interpreted soberly, if joy- 
fully, in language as near the fact as they could bring 
it. If the language has the surge and swing about it of 
"joy unspeakable and full of glory," that is always the 
mark of real experience, new and startling; and it con- 
firms the Christian story, that men should find it un- 
speakable. Historically, men have found the power of 
habit overcome and the nature transformed by Jesus 
Christ — instinct and impulse as much changed as mind 
and heart, a rebirth of the whole being. What forgive- 
ness could be without this, it is hard to see; it must be 
this, or it is nothing; and Christian experience is solid 
on the reality of this change. 

In the third place, the influence of sin upon others — 
in some ways the hardest aspect of the matter. A man 
submits himself to Christ, is reborn, remade, or what- 
ever our phrase be to describe the amazing extent of 
the change ; but the woman he seduced, or the son whom 
he tainted with low moral standards, what of them? 
Can he 

"Let the wretch go festering through Florence," 

and be at peace with God? The act is beyond recall; the 
innocent suffer or are defiled; how can there be "peace 



90 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

with God," would it not be damnable insensibility? 
There are two lines of reply. It is a consideration to be 
remembered, that a man is responsible for his influence, 
but not wholly for another's reception of it. The great 
quack of the last days of the French monarchy took in 
all sorts of persons, but, as Carlyle points out, Cagliostro 
failed with thoroughly honest people. If the woman or 
the son, whom we have imagined, had been thoroughly 
sound, the bad influence would have been turned aside. 
The man is responsible for the effects of his influence, 
which are serious enough, but not for another man or 
woman's self-determination. The other person is never 
merely wax; he, too, or she, has a responsibility. But, 
put things at the very worst, the problem will be best 
decided by reference to the Christian experience of 
Jesus. "It is simply not true," says Dr. D. S. Cairns, 
"to speak of the irreparable past, and not well to dwell 
upon it. Go deeper and take God into account. It is 
part of his omnipotence that he can retrieve it. The 
story is not finished yet. Those who believe in God 
believe in a retrieving future." Thus it all comes back 
once again to that conviction of God which Jesus has 
brought into human experience. Jesus was after all the 
friend of men, clear-sighted beyond the best of us; was 
he going to leave men unhealed just when the healing 
mattered most to themselves and to others? To think so 
is to miss the reality of his nature. 

Finally, we have to remember that the holiness, which 
Jesus gives to character, is not a negative thing of taboos, 
"a fugitive and cloistered virtue," in Milton's fine phrase, 
that "slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland 
is to be run for, not without dust and heat." He has 
given us another conception of holiness, as a positive 
and redemptive thing that seeks the contact of sinful men, 
that faces dust and heat, temptation, agony, and the cross 



THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 91 

itself — something functional and reproductive, no "trea- 
sure in a napkin" buried and sterile, but seed sown and 
growing and bearing a hundredfold, the most prolific and 
living thing imaginable. To venture on a modern simile, 
it is more like chlorine than blotting-paper. 

It is thus that Jesus has dealt with sin. He gave it an 
importance it had never had before; he brought out its 
meaning; he got it into the light of God's face. But he 
also brought men to look on God's face. "We have peace 
with God," says Paul (Rom. 5:1) ; it is historically true, 
and the way of it and the results of it deserve attention. 
The man who is at peace with God is no longer resentful 
of God's action, whatever form it take. He no longer 
tries to protect himself against God. As in a human 
friendship a man drops habits of criticism and self -pro- 
tection, and absorbs his friend, so the man "at peace 
with God" opens his heart, consciously and, perhaps still 
more, unconsciously to God. It is not till then that God's 
personality can make itself felt. 

The result in the growth of mind and character cannot 
be hid. Of such growth the Christian Church can show 
abundant evidence, both in individuals and in the society 
they make. So that we are justified in concluding that 
there has 'been some real and effective treatment of sin, 
that men have been set free from it, and have a new life 
in God — in short, that Jesus has reconciled men to God, 
that he has solved the problem of forgiveness, and that 
the solution is "the love of God which is in Christ Jesus 
our Lord" (Rom. 8:39). 



CHAPTER VI 
THE REVELATION OF GOD 

Tantum Deus cognoscitur quantum diligitur. 

— Bernard of Clairvaux. 

In the long history of religion with all its cross-cur- 
rents and backwaters, the windings of the stream, and 
the great barren expanses of shale and sand where no 
water is, it is possible with care to mark a direction and 
a progress. Certain things emerge from close study 
which it is impossible to mistake and which gain signifi- 
cance as we reflect upon them. 

Man, it has been said, is incurably religious, and the 
explanation is given by Plato — "the unexamined life is 
not livable for a human being." 1 He is bound by some- 
thing implanted in him to reflect upon his experience, 
and, while thought does not add to his experience, it so 
brings out the meaning of it, as to make it a new thing 
and to prepare the way for fresh discovery. The past 
becomes the present and points to the future — is the 
future, one might almost say, so truly 

"Old experience doth attain 

To something of prophetic strain." 



Four tendencies may be remarked in the development 
of religion, not all equally strong in every race but all in 
some degree potent. 



1 Apology, 3$ A. 

92 



THE REVELATION OF GOD 93 

First of all, man is driven to unify his experience. We 
talk of peopJe thinking in compartments, but it is impos- 
sible to dofit for very long; either the thought or the 
compartments must go, and with mankind at large it is 
thought that triumphs. Plato's ideal of "the contempla- 
tion of all time and all existence" 3 owes to him a magni- 
ficent phrasing ; the ideal was latent in every living mind 
from the beginning — a vague date, I know, but no other is 
available. Probably all the great strides in thought have 
been connected with the unification of experience. A dis- 
covery or even a suggestion that reduces our categories, 
that simplifies our thinking, is always hailed as a step for- 
ward; if it prove valid, it will never be really lost. The 
greatest truths are those that achieve this for us most 
effectively, and over the largest range. 

Secondly, however picturesque in long retrospect the 
vague cults and fears of animism may seem, animism 
has never given a secure foothold to thinking man. The 
Olympian gods of Greece were bound to overcome their 
predecessors. Mankind tacitly held that there is nothing 
in the universe greater than personality; the word is of 
the most modern, the faith very ancient. Men gave their 
gods personality; or, rather, they found themselves un- 
able to think of their gods as less than personal. To 
recognize the gods as possessed of feeling, intellect, and 
character was a step forward — a necessary step; and 
where it was not taken there was no progress. Perhaps 
the chief value of this step forward was that it made 
another inevitable — to the unity of the godhead. The 
unthinking in Greece held for ever to vague animistic 
conceptions, to demons; and there was periodic reaction 
to them. The separate gods long held the field, but the 
thinkers saw beyond them. Israel and Greece took dif- 
ferent roads at this point; Greece reached the unity of 



3 Republic, VI:486 A. 



94 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

God more decisively than his personality ; Israel, by some 
happy instinct or thanks to prophetic genius, grasped 
and kept the personality of the one God, and there lay 
the key to the future. 

A third tendency is toward the supremacy of moral 
law. One of the great struggles in the fifth century 
B.C., the most brilliant age of Greece, was to decide 
whether morality were custom or nature, vofios or <f>vo-is. 
The word used for law suggested custom as the basis of 
morality, but experience was stronger than etymology. 
Human life was not a mere succcession of accidents, more 
or less regulated by tacit conventions ; there was (in our 
modern sense — one cannot now escape the word) law in 
it, something underlying it, valid, potent, not to be 
escaped. If reproduction was a natural human instinct, 
some kind of morality was another; as real and eventu- 
ally as imperious. Society rested on something deeper 
than conventions; if men were to be men in any true 
sense, theft, adultery, and murder, to name only the most 
obvious things, were intolerable; they ruined any real 
human life, they must be a denial of something natural, 
a refusal of the order of the universe. A long while 
before Plato made all this clear, men brought to bear 
upon the gods their conviction of the supremacy of 
righteousness. Zeus, as iEschylus saw, stands for law, 
inevitable, universal, and intelligible to man. "If gods 
do deeds of shame, the less gods they," says one of 
Euripides' characters. These two great poets do but 
sum up and bring to expression what had long been 
working in the Greek mind and what was to discredit 
their pantheon. The Hebrew moved, perhaps more con- 
spicuously but hardly more certainly, in the same direc- 
tion. Righteousness becomes the central conception for 
all true thought upon man's life and upon the being of 
God. 



THE REVELATION OF GOD 95 

In the fourth place, man came to realize intensively 
the significance of his own personality. A large part of 
Greek history may be summed up as a series of experi- 
ments, by which the individual secures recognition of 
himself. Politically it became more and more obvious 
how much he meant ; Greek history was made and unmade 
in a degree beyond anything we know in the West by 
men amazingly, even desperately, individual and unmis- 
takable. Greek philosophy is the outcome of the indi- 
vidual man's determination to do his own thinking him- 
self, and be done with his neighbor and his grandfather. 
In religion it is the same. The Greek made up his mind 
that he must be immortal. 3 It is this glorious assertion 
of personality, with the glad acceptance of the duties 
that go with it, that made the Greek the world's teacher. 
Strange as it seems, he had to teach the Hebrew the doc- 
trine of personal immortality. 

These four tendencies are to be traced through the 
history of all religion. They have their fates, of course ; 
here one is over-emphasized and another lost. But a 
survey of the whole field confirms us in the conviction 
not only of their validity but of their vitality. Where 
one or other of these tendencies is repressed, religion 
suffers. Men's convictions as to the nature of God control 
the fates of races and empires ; they are the most potent 
things mankind has. A doctrine of God that ignores his 
unity, his personality, or my personality, or the right- 
eousness that must govern us both, leads to disaster. Any 
doctrine, further, that suggests contempt or even inatten- 
tion towards any real feature in God or man, fails to 
endure, or, if it endures, the human race suffers for it. 
My personality includes feeling and reason, the instinct 
for wife and child and state, an imperious demand for 



8 Plutarch, who sometimes hits off (or borrows) a good phrase, says, 
"The hope of immortality and the passion to be is of all our loves oldest 
and greatest." (Non Suaviter, 1104 c). 



96 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

an ever larger life, for a richer development of nature 
and character — that is what the Greek teaches us, and 
we know by now that he is right ; and any religion which 
denies me any of these claims will produce a poorer type 
of mankind, a lie of some sort, and not the true thing. 
And further, before we pass on, when the modern man 
— at his simplest, as we may lightly say — is overheard 
asking: "How can I be right with God?" the question 
embodies the four great tendencies we have been dis- 
cussing; it recognizes God and his ego as paramount, 
acting together in a single sphere, and both recognizing 
Right as their common ground. History itself is a record 
of man's endeavor to "get right with God," to find out 
God's meaning for human life and to adjust society to it. 4 

II 

But, as Plato says, "the Father and Maker of this 
whole it is hard to find, and when one has found him to 
declare him to all is impossible." 5 That a sense of 
strangeness and foreignness lies like a fog across the 
entrance of the divine country, a certain wonder whether 
a mere man has any business there, an unreality about 
it all, is the moving confession of a modern thinker. 8 
God is so manifold that it is hard to be sure that one has 
the whole of him. His ideas man only slowly gathers; 
some easily, as those about gravitation and by and by 
those about fire, and later and with less ease those about 
germs (let us say) and electricity; but his more funda- 
mental thoughts are more deeply hidden and only to be 



* The influence of the Stoic "Law of Nature" on the development of 
Roman law is only one obvious illustration. 

5 Timaeus, 29 C; cf. Clem. Alex. Protr. 68, and Celsus, Orig, c. 
Cels. 7: 42, who quote the passage from very different angles and in 
very different tempers. 

•Phillips Brooks, The Light of the World, p. 6. 



THE REVELATION OF GOD 97 

reached by longer and more painful experience and 
thought more long and painful still. 7 And man is im- 
patient of the lingering processes of thought. The phil- 
osophers are so slow, and life so short; one must have 
an effective relation with God, and there are other 
teachers who do not for ever tell us to wait and see; 
they act and achieve — at least they say so. A great 
cleavage comes in men's progress; these go to the right, 
moving slowly and stumblingly, checking their move- 
ments and their discoveries, halting and retracing their 
steps again and again; those go gaily and confidently to 
the left, happy in their freedom from doubt, happy in 
their activity and their sensations; and mankind is 
indebted to both — though to which the more, we may 
not so readily agree. 

Must we know God before we can have relations with 
Godhead? The Graeco-Roman world was divided on this 
question. The philosophers were uncertain and slow, 
not clear about God's personality, stronger on his unity, 
far from precise about our consciousness of relation with 
him. "He is not far from any one of you," they said; 
they even spoke of a holy spirit within you; 8 but then it 
was not clear once more, whether they meant spirit or 
breath, a divine indwelling in the soul, or a divine crea- 
tion of the soul from some fragment of itself (divinae 
particulam aurae)' There was, they said, a great Some- 
thing beyond, the soul of the world (anima mundi) per- 
haps, or Something further away still, "beyond being." 10 
But how is one to have contact with that? In him we 
live and move and have our being ; his laws condition our 
life: 



7 Hence perhaps the famous saying of Heraclitus (c. 600 B,&) that "a 
hidden harmony is better than one obvious." 

8 So Seneca, Ep. 41, 1: Sacer intra nos spiritus sedet. 

9 Horace, Satires, 2:2, 79; cf. Epictetus, D., 2:8: <ri> airotrxafffia el rov 8tov. 
"Celsus ap. Origen, c. Cels., 7:45. 



98 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; 
And the most ancient Heavens, through Thee, are 
fresh and strong." 

For Wordsworth's Ode to Duty is own brother to the 
Hymn of Cleanthes — but younger and more poet-souled. 
But there were those who were not philosophers, who 
resented for one thing the philosophic air ("How blest 
are we that are not simple men"), who were more in a 
hurry for peace of mind, who tired quickly of the abstract 
and who resented the infinite distance that philosophy 
put between them and their hopes, between them and God. 
The story of the recrudescence of cult and ritual, of 
superstition and magic, in the Roman Empire is a pain- 
ful chapter in the history of mankind. But behind it all 
lay instincts that the philosophers had been forgetting. 
They were content with a soul, which, while they called 
it "a particle of God," was really no more than a little 
parcel of elements to be untied one day and scattered 
among the larger masses of those elements in the uni- 
verse — in plain terms, it would be lost. 11 They empha- 
sized the ego and forgot him ; they urged on him infinite 
grandeur and failed to see that he had any needs or 
cravings at all, or suggested that if he had, he might 
better suppress them. The religious temperament was 
not to be satisfied so, and it became engaged in a vigorous 
conflict with philosophy — a battle for the reality, the im- 
mortality of the soul, for the nearness of God to man, 
for the conviction that intimate relation between God 
and the soul is the essence and heart of life. It was in 
vain that philosophy showed how near God comes to men 
in knowledge and in understanding, how the divine 
knowledge and the human hold converse. Men were in 
a hurry; they grew tired of thinking; they must feel. 



11 Seneca, Consolation (end) , 



THE REVELATION OF GOD 99 

The common man's hurry is the quack's opportunity. 
Hence came, as we have seen, the sects that promised 
speedy peace with heaven, certainty, security and enjoy- 
ment, rapt moments and the most delicious sensations 
of union with gods, and light upon immortality. Intui- 
tion and initiation were the watchwords. Religion was 
dissipated in an emotionalism that lost all sense of defini- 
tion; nothing was clear, all was vague. There were (and 
are) those whose teaching is that that is ideal religion; 
but something was lost, when reason abdicated — the 
stern morality of the Stoic went, the clear vision of 
Plato, the very sense of truth. 12 

From the struggle certain results emerge. A faraway 
God will not do; any tampering with the reality of the 
soul is fatal; emotion is no guide to truth; religion 
without morality, morality without religion, neither will 
satisfy the stern and loving nature of man. 

Ill 

The Jew in the Roman Empire had after all a richer 
heritage in religion than the Greek. Before the days 
of the great prophets Israel had been clear about the per- 
sonality of Jehovah. It was a gain that the syncretism, 
that made one Zeus of many and, by keeping all the 
legends of the many, made the one polygamous and non- 
moral generally, had no parallel in Israel's experience. 
Slowly, led by prophet and psalmist, Israel concentrated 
mind and heart on one God, "the God of the whole earth," 
the God of Nature, the God of history; and a monothe- 
ism grew up that was passionate. . 

"The lord descended from above 
and bowed the heavens hie; 

12 P. Wendland, Hell. Rom. Kultur, p. 168, sums up this general move- 
ment as "Theosophy for the cultured, superstition the vulgar's daily bread." 



100 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

And underneath his feet he caat 

the darkenes of the skie; 
On Cherubs and on Cherubins 

ful royally he rode, 
And on the wings of al the windes 

came flying al abroad. 

So the Elizabethan Puritan rendered the eighteenth 
Psalm. The hundred and fourth Psalm, the thirty-eighth 
chapter of Job, show alike with what feeling and poetry 
monotheism could clothe itself, and how Nature in its 
beauty becomes a revelation of God. The visions of 
Isaiah and the other great prophets all associate the One 
God with righteousness, terrible and overpowering, but 
eminently just and reasonable. If prayer is the final 
test of any real monotheism, 13 Hebrew religion alone in 
antiquity could stand it. The unity of all experience, 
the personality of the One God, the universal scope of 
righteousness, are the glorious contribution of Israel to 
the religion of mankind. Very curiously, personal im- 
mortality was only a later conviction, but in time it was 
achieved. 

It is too late to quarrel with the forgotten scholars 
who organized the canon of the Old Testament, and per- 
haps needless, for their spiritual and their literary 
instincts were generally sound. The apocryphal and 
pseudonymous books of the last three centuries B.C. have 
neither the religious nor the literary value of the earlier 
prophets. But a great deal is lost for the student of reli- 
gion who neglects them. The Jew in those difficult cen- 
turies was in the most painful contact with new situa- 
tions and the new ideas that they involve. He had 
reached the conception of Jehovah being the God of the 
whole earth; but, influenced by Greek and perhaps other 
thinkers, he was not quite so easy about his own rela- 



18 So J. H. Moulton, Treasure of the Magi, p. 101. 



THE REVELATION OF GOD 101 

tions with Jehovah. He recognized, more than ever 
before, the mind of Jehovah in the course of history ; but 
Jehovah more and more seemed to work from a distance, 
to keep aloof from the world he controlled; it might be 
by angels," it might be by his wisdom," or by the Torah 
(his law) that he managed the affairs of men, but he in 
his holiness was out of their touch, almost out of their 
ken; even his name was not to be spoken. 19 The Sep- 
tuagint shows the feeling of the age in toning down the 
grosser anthropomorphisms of the Hebrew bible. 17 It 
was with cowering awe that later Judaism regarded him 
— even angels "could not behold his face by reason of the 
magnificence and glory" (1 Enoch 14:21) ; but with out- 
bursts of extraordinary assurance. The present was 
abominable ; the position of the nation went from bad to 
worse; so Jewish thinkers ranged into the future. In 
the apocalyptic books we have their philosophy of his- 
tory, their conviction that fundamental Justice is the 
secret of the universe, that present wrong will yet, by 
God's providence, issue somehow in future right. Despite 
a more or less Eastern dualism that begins to haunt their 
minds, they are so far influenced by the Greek concep- 
tion of the unity of existence, reinforcing prophetic 
teaching. Their God is not quite the God of the prophets ; 
he is eloquent, finicking, and imperial, he depends on 
Greek rhetoric as well as on spiritual truth and intuition ; 
and, while he is universal, "hating nothing that he has 
made," 18 he has a marked weakness for his own tribe. 
And yet this God achieves some things beyond the vision 
of the greater prophets; he is much more interested in 



14 It is pointed out that this idea is already in Ezekiel, t but see Daniel 
and the Book of Jubilees for a furthur development of it. Also R. H. 
Charles, Enoch, index s.v. Angels. 

"Drummond, Philo, 2, pp. 214 ff.; cf. II Enoch (Secrets), 30:8: "On 
the sixth day I commanded my Wisdom to make man of seven substances."' 

"A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, p. 286. 

" W. Fairweather, The Background of the Gospels, p. 329. 

"Wisdom 11:24. 



102 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

the individual — "the souls of the righteous are in the 
hand of God," " and he will keep them and give them 
another life, a better life, with not only the conscious- 
ness of the victory of right but ocular evidence of it. A 
last judgment, resurrection, immortality, a Messianic 
intervention — the ideas are never far away in this period. 
Naturally they are never very distinct; men's guesses 
and intuitions wavered; but Jehovah would overcome 
Satan, and the pious believer was safe in entrusting him- 
self to God. In this period of depressed national life, 
there thus rises a developed conception of personal reli- 
gion, which can be traced back to the individualism of 
Jeremiah. 20 

When we compare the development of religion in Israel 
with the course it took in the Graeco-Roman world, it 
seems a fair conclusion from the experience of Israel 
that more is gained in the quest of the knowledge of God 
along the line of thought and intellect than by the line 
of cult and emotion. Emotion has its place; it may be 
doubtfully true that some experience of facts is only 
reached by means of emotion; but emotion seems a nor- 
mal concomitant of the deepest experiences. Thus emo- 
tion has to be crossexamined, its evidence has to be 
checked, and its data corrected. Every man is born a 
metaphysician, and knows that emotion and intuition are 
amenable to the court of experience and that experience 
can only be interpreted by reason ; though not every man 
will take the trouble to carry the process through. The 
Jew, if Mr. Montefiore's picture of him is true, grew 
tired of thinking out his religion and took it for granted. 
Meantime the Graeco-Roman world, depressed by long 
wars and ruined by the loss of freedom, was in a hurry 
for spiritual peace; it swung off from the philosophic 



"Wisdom 3:1. 

20 J. P. Peters, Religion of the Hebrews, p. 441. 



THE REVELATION OF GOD 103 

school to the shrine, and before long it compelled the 
philosophers also to come and make their peace with the 
gods of taboo and magic. 

IV 

Into such a world came Jesus, a re-creating force. He 
brought a new conception of God, which on examination 
we find to comprise all the gains made by all the world 
through centuries of experience. The four great features, 
which we have noticed in the development of religious 
thought, are to be found in his teaching — one world, One 
God and that God personal, righteousness, and the per- 
sonality of man. But the difference with him lies in the 
value he gives to personality. Personal as the Hebrew 
prophets had made God, none of them dreamed of a God 
so intensely real, so boundlessly personal, so amazingly 
akin to man. The boldness and the sweep of Jesus here 
outrun description. The corollaries of his belief in God's 
personality are an entire transformation of the idea of 
righteousness and a new emphasis on the significance of 
the human soul, that, next to his belief in God, has been 
the most powerful thing in history. 

Plato had recognized the natural affinity of God and 
man, their mutual intelligibility ; man, he said, was made 
by nature to be intimate with God (ot/cetw? I^etv 7rpo? tov 
6e6v); but Plato never came near such a sense as Jesus 
had of God's kinship, interest, and nearness. Jesus pic- 
tures a God who loves and who enjoys the world he has 
made, down to the last little sparrow in a nestful, who 
thinks in terms of color and life and movement, and 
who above all else loves and enjoys the nature of man, 
sees through man's limitations his worth and grandeur, 
and cannot do without him. What teacher ever gave 
God so thorough and so puissant a personality? He will 



104 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

have no God remote if just, still less a God beyond being : 
he pictures a God involved in all the tragedy of all the 
world, who takes and keeps the most resolute and self- 
sacrificing initiative, a God of energy and hope. He pic- 
tures God as the good shepherd, who seeks the lost sheep 
and who finds it and puts it on his shoulders with joy — 
God as rejoicing with all his friends in heaven over one 
sinner that repents — an emphasis beyond all others on 
man's personality. 21 Other teachers more than half hinted 
failure in God, his world a mistake, to be made over 
again, the larger part of the men (for whom he was sup- 
posed to care) utter fiascos, mere fuel for the flames of 
hell and nothing more to be made of them. Not so Jesus; 
he saw better and read the triumph of God; the leaven 
leavens the meal; the seed brings forth a hundredfold; 
the lost sheep is found; the lost son comes home, drawn 
by his Father's invincible and irresistible love. God 
never made the wondrous human soul to be "cast as rub- 
bish to the void." Fecisti nos ad te, said Augustine, 
"Thou hast made us for thyself"; and he learnt it from 
Jesus, who saw that God will have us, that he breaks 
down the obstacles between man and himself, and when 
man is angry with him or suspicious of him reconciles 
him to himself. Jesus "passed by the grand classical 
speech of religion, which was fast becoming a dead 
language to the living world . . . and took up the father 
and mother tongue, the dialect of the human heart, and 
at his summons and by the transfiguring power of his 
personality, the name of Father became pure and great 
enough to describe the inmost nature of the Eternal 
One." " 
Men believed the message of Jesus. He gave it partly 



21 Cf. Phillips Brooks, The Light of the World, p. 333. "The summons 
of God for men to join Him in His joy appears to open a new region of 
motive." 

22 D. S. Cairns, Christianity and the Modern World, p. 52. 



THE REVELATION OF GOD 105 

in words — but such words ! Words of genius full of the 
life and spirit of a most vital and energizing personality. 
The words had his life, his fire, his depth, and his happi- 
ness in them, and they were irresistible. He spoke in 
pictures, far more illuminating than definitions. More 
still, Jesus brought home to men his conviction of God 
by what he was. There is no describing personality; 
you have to touch it to know it. Genius and talent are 
extraordinarily alike, except that they are utterly differ- 
ent. "There's very little difference between one man and 
another," said a working man to Professor William 
James; "but," he added, "what there is, is very im- 
portant." Genius gets outside our categories and defies 
even our powers of quotation and misquotation; it will 
not be hackneyed. Jesus is clear away beyond all our 
teachers. His personality leaps from the Greek text, 
and the Elizabethan English, despite our familiarity with 
them, and is alive again and charms men still into half- 
believing what he says, and wholly venturing upon it and 
finding it true. 

Do men find it true? Can we use the experience of 
the Christian Church, if we can recapture it, to deter- 
mine the truth of what he said? Let us go back a little. 
Let us recall the four points on which we find that man 
has been insisting through all his religious history. If 
there is not something fundamental about them, some- 
thing in a deep sense true, then it is hard to find any 
meaning at all in the experience of mankind. We find, 
however, that not one of them is lost sight of without 
some tragic decline in the people who lose it, church or 
no church, some failure to keep abreast of the deep 
realities, some abandonment of what is essential in human 
nature. But where men have taken Jesus at the foot of 
the letter and treated him so seriously as to risk life and 
the soul on his veracity, we find, as the Fourth Gospel 



10G JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

put it, "life and life more abundantly." The test will be 
what Jesus has made of life, and we shall draw our evi- 
dence not from people officially wearing his uniform, as 
it were, and using his name, but from people who throw 
in their lot with him and face Gethsemane and Calvary 
with him. For we must remember that many ships will 
float in fair weather, but the storm shows their quality. 
How has the teaching of Jesus weathered the centuries? 
Aristotle once said that in the Greek mysteries men 
and women were "put into a certain frame of mind," and 
"had feelings." A modern Anglican writer has on these 
grounds compared them with the sacraments. But the 
Christian has historically learnt to be independent of his 
feelings, as Bunyan did in Bedford Jail. He has some- 
how gained an assurance, beyond feeling, 23 that his 
Heavenly Father is the real figure in the story, whatever 
the story was — privation, prison, martyrdom, or what 
not, and he knows that he has "peace with God." If the 
next step is crucifixion, he will, in the splendid sugges- 
tion of Jesus, bring a cross with him — a magnificent 
extension of the principle of going an extra mile when 
requisitioned. Life has become full in every detail with 
God, rich and gracious and great. 2 * There is union with 
God, but not the static union conceived of in Greek mys- 
teries, but a union whose business it is 

"To read what is yet unread 
In the manuscripts of God," 

to hold communion with the Heavenly Father along the 
line of everything that interests him — a large pro- 
gramme, larger perhaps than any one before Christ, 



23 It is interesting to note the prevalence in the Fourth Gospel, com- 
monly supposed to be more mystical than the other three, of words that 
emphasize thought and intellect rather than feeling; viz., the verb "to 
know," the nouns "light" and "truth." 

34 A later chapter (XIII) will take up this point. 



THE REVELATION OF GOD 107 

except Plato perhaps, could have contemplated. Jesus 
has historically created this mind in men — a passion to 
reach God in all he does, color, movement, life and death, 
the sea, the stars, and the human soul. 

"The pure in heart shall see God," said Jesus (Matt. 
5) ; the impure do not see him; they do not want to see 
him, and they are saved from it, though not to their 
gain. But men convicted of sin are afraid of God. In 
both ways sin has been an obstacle to the knowledge of 
God. If, then, we find the Christian with a passion for 
God, on God's terms, and with a growing intelligence of 
God, it seems reasonable to conclude that, whatever the 
process, sin has in him been effectively dealt with. When 
we find further that the Christian habitually attempts it 
in the belief that Jesus was serious and spoke from 
experience when he spoke of God; when we find that he 
achieves the impossible, captures historically the Roman 
Empire for Christ, wins Europe to a Reformation for 
Christ, makes Christ the mainspring of the most momen- 
tous changes in modern India and China; it again seems 
reasonable to conclude that the Christian is in touch 
with some real force. Jesus came in an age rather like 
our own, an age willing to discuss for ever; he came with 
the power of God and changed the world. 

This is to treat Christian experience in a summary 
way, but the more closely it is studied, the more it verifies 
the teaching of Jesus upon God. When an experiment in 
science succeeds, it is fair to hold that the principles to 
be tested in it are confirmed — unless there is error some- 
where, met and frustrated by some accident. But in sci- 
ence nothing is based on single experiments; a result is 
not counted established till it is confirmed by a series of 
experiments and by independent observers. The belief 
that Jesus has made a real revelation of God rests on the 
evidence of lives devoted to testing it in every century 



108 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

since Pilate ruled over Judaea, in every continent, and by 
men of the most widely different antecedents, in race, 
culture, and religion. The Christian life rests on Jesus' 
conception of God as relevant, as a father, as ours in 
deepest literalness. But, again and again, it must be 
remarked that the impulse to put the thing to the test 
came and still comes from the personality of Jesus him- 
self, and from the cross which Jesus chose and in which 
he showed men the essential nature of God. 

A further point remains. That Jesus has stimulated 
men to explore God to his depths and heights, has already 
been said; but there is another side to it. God, it is 
men's experience, is to be apprehended along the line of 
every human faculty, every sensitivness. The author of 
every aspect of life will touch the human spirit at every 
point. Interests, as the Latin proverb says, pass into 
character; a man is developed by what interests and 
occupies him. The Christian occupation has been with 
God, following the cue and the impulse given by Jesus. 
What has been its reaction upon character? Does the 
Christian nation (so far as we can judge from the very 
partially Christian nations as yet known) recede as a 
result of living, as far as it does, on the principles of 
Jesus? Men's ideas of God, formulated or not, but acted 
upon, have been the most potent factors in the fate of 
races and institutions. It may seem abstract, but there 
are few things so drastic and operative as an idea. What 
have ibeen the effects of the ideas of Jesus upon national 
life? That will occupy us in two later chapters, but, 
without risking repetition, it will suffice to suggest that 
so far the nations that have been most serious in dealing 
with the ideas of Jesus have not proved backward in 
other ways, whatever the test. 

The same holds of individual men and women. Jesus, 
beside giving the impulse to explore God, enlarges our 



THE REVELATION OF GOD 109 

capacities for knowing God. The habit of studying and 
assimilating all that we mean by Christ, enlarges a man's 
aptitude for capturing that mind of God which Jesus 
tempts him to explore. Jesus develops character in 
those who follow him, and character is the key to the 
discovery of God, as he said. He charms men to forget 
themselves in coming with him, and the obedience that 
is instinctive becomes illumination. The historical Jesus 
whom they follow, they discover — when their attention 
is taken from themselves and their own preconceptions 
and fixed upon him — to be not the veiling but the unveil- 
ing of God, and seeing him as he is they grow like him 
(I John 3:2). 

V 

So far the effect of Jesus in the experience of men as 
the Revealer of God. Out of this experience came the 
Christology of the Church. In Christology we begin to 
touch the region of theory, but the promise made to the 
reader 25 that he and not the writer is to be the theologian, 
will be kept. All that I now propose is to suggest that 
an examination of the titles given to Jesus by the 
Church, will show that they are each an attempt to 
explain his person from his work, and that taken together 
they shed a light on the Church's experience — a light the 
more valuable, because here the Church will not be speak- 
ing directly of that experience for any purpose, but will 
reveal it unconsciously. 

The names given to Jesus are many and are drawn 
from a good many types of thought and analogy. Messiah 
is Hebrew ; Logos is Greek ; Homoousios is another Greek 
word, and more philosophical; Photagogos, the Light- 
bringer, came from the mysteries. 30 But they all point 



25 In the introduction. 

29 Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus. 



110 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

to the same thing. Whether "anointed" by God, or the 
"reason" of God (an idea owing something to the 
Stoic "generative reason," A.oyo? o-Trep/xariKos, and "soul 
of the universe," anima mundi) Jesus is in either case 
recognized as one who has a special right, and even a 
commission, to interpret God to men. In other words the 
titles speak of the Christian belief that Jesus did bring 
a valid and realiable revelation of God to men. Homo- 
ousios says the same thing. If God was really, as the 
Neo-Platonists said, "beyond being," if he could neither 
be apprehended nor set forth, imagined nor grasped by 
reason, feeling, or any human faculty; if there was no 
link between God and man, then Jesus was as futile in 
the long run as any other man. But this the Church 
would not believe, and it "denied the antecedent," and 
affirmed a real essential link between God and Jesus; 
whatever "being" might be, it was not an impassable gulf 
between Jesus and God, it was something in which they 
were one. 27 When then Jesus speaks of what God is, he 
is not traveling outside his experience, he is speaking 
with knowledge, and in him we can know God. That lies 
at the heart of the Church's more philosophical doctrines. 

There are simpler and dearer names than Homoousios. 
Jesus is Mediator, Paraclete, High Priest, the Beloved, 
for the men of the first century — all names that speak 
of the real relation which he establishes (between God 
and men. All the Incarnation doctrines point to the same 
conviction that Jesus does reveal God. 

If he does not— then it would look as if human experi- 
ence had very little real value, as if little were to be learnt 
from it, whatever clarity and force of mind were brought 
to bear upon it. For if Jesus does not reveal God, our 



27 If Christ is only Homoiousios, "like in essence," we are really no 
nearer to God, the Church taught; "like, but oh! how different" under- 
lay the Arian view, at its most irenical. 



THE REVELATION OF GOD 111 

chance of learning of God from souls of less depth and 
purity and intensity is small indeed. We shall be driven 
back to the vagueness of the later Greek speculation; 
nor is that a distant risk. One effect of the discoveries 
of natural science, of the progress made in that field, is 
to emphasize the grandeur and wonder of the mind (if 
we may venture so much) that underlies the creation. 
We are liable to lose ourselves in a dim consciousness of 
a power that deals with universals at best, a power to be 
surmised, not known, of which little can be predicated 
beyond ingenuity and efficiency — features more and more 
staggering as we track out the laws and forces at work 
in the world, and less and less human with every acces- 
sion to our knowledge. Less and less human (if the 
adjective may be allowed) this power becomes, less and 
less intelligible to humanity, because ingenuity and effi- 
ciency do not make character; and in proportion as they 
are magnified without the balancing attributes of love 
and tenderness, they make their possessor more awful, 
awful to the verge of hateful. 

But this line of thought ignores the better part of our 
experience, and the part which can be more closely and 
clearly known and understood. It is the human side of 
things which we know; and, just because Jesus shares 
that, we can understand him and use him. To clear our 
thought and to give us a real base of action, we must 
have a firm hold on man's experience; and Jesus gives 
us that. Luther put the case strongly, but not too 
strongly, when he wrote in his Commentary on Gala- 
tians (1 ;3) : "Whensoever thou art occupied in the mat- 
ter of thy salvation, setting aside all curious speculations 
of God's unsearchable majesty, all cogitations of works, 
of traditions, of philosophy, yea and of God's law, too, 
run straight to the manger and embrace this infant and 
the virgin's little babe in thine arms, and behold him as 



112 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

he was born, sucking, growing up, conversant among 
men, teaching, dying, rising again, ascending up above 
all the heavens and having power above all things. By 
this means shalt thou be able to shake off all terrors and 
errors, like as the sun driveth away the clouds. And 
this sight and contemplation will keep thee in the right 
way that thou mayest follow whither Christ is gone." 2 * 
In his Table-Talk we find the idea again and more than 
once: "Begin thou to seek God there, where Christ him- 
self began"; "He that without danger will know God 
and will speculate of him, let him look first into the 
Manger, that is let him begin below . . . Afterwards he 
will finely learn to know who God is. As then the same 
knowledge will not affright, but it will be most sweet, 
loving and comfortable. But take good heed (I say) in 
any case of high climbing cogitations, to clamber up to 
Heaven without this Ladder, namely the Lord Christ in 
his humanity." 20 

Our danger is the abstract; the Neo-Platonist gloried 
in it, but not profitably, for God in his thought became 
more and more emptied of all content and sank to being, 
as a modern philosopher has said, "the deification of 
the word Not" But if it is a real relation which Jesus 
establishes between God and men, if Jesus does reveal 
God, then, not to go further from the limits of our sub- 
ject, we are led to a reflection, surely legitimate. If 
Jesus is continually enlarging our capacity for God, is 
it not a promise of fuller knowledge and clearer vision 
— a pledge that some day we shall see him himself as he 
is, and give him his own name? So at least one early 
Christian writer promises us (Rev. 2:17; 3:12). 



2S From the second edition of the English translation, 1580. 
™ Table-Talk, ch. I, p. 17 (folio); ch. II, p. 61. 



CHAPTER VII 

IMMORTALITY 

I 

In the so-called Gospel of Nicodemus are loosely linked 
two apocryphal books of very different interest and prob- 
ably of different age. The first need not detain us; it 
is a retelling of the story of the trial and crucifixion of 
Jesus with much added detail, detail trivial as the clues 
in a dull detective story. To this has been appended, by 
the simplest of devices, a work of imagination. Joseph 
of Arimatheia tells the chief priests of two men risen 
from the dead since the crucifixion; the men are asked 
to tell what happened; they "made on their faces the 
sign of the cross and said to the chief priests, 'Give us 
paper and ink and a pen/ They brought them. And sit- 
ting down they wrote thus: 

" 'Lord Jesus, the resurrection and the life of the world, 
give us grace that we may set forth thy resurrection 
and the wondrous things which thou hast done in Hades. 
We then were in Hades with all them that had fallen 
asleep from the beginning. And in the hour of midnight 
into those dark places rose as it were the light of the 
sun and shone, and we were all enlightened and saw one 
another/ " 

Abraham and others recognize what is happening: 
"This is the light from the great enlightenment," and 
Isaiah gently quotes the prophecy he made when alive: 
"Land of Zebulon and land of Naphthali, the people that 

113 



114 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

sitteth in darkness, behold a great light." "An ascetic 
from the desert" comes and tells how he has made the 
ways of the Son of God straight, and preached repent- 
ance, and how when he saw the Son of God he said: 
"Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the 
world," and how he baptized him, and how he has been 
sent by him to preach to the dead. Adam and Seth take 
part and recall an ancient prophecy of the Son of God 
"made man," and patriarchs and prophets rejoiced 
greatly. 

Satan now tells Hades of the deeds and death of Jesus, 
and bids prepare to hold him fast; and Hades doubts the 
wisdom of Satan's bringing him there. As they talked, 
"there was a great voice as thunder that said: 'Open 
your gates, ye rulers, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting 
doors, and the King of Glory shall come in/ And Hades, 
when he heard, saith to Satan: 'Go forth, if thou canst, 
and withstand him.' " The gates are made fast, while 
David and Isaiah recall their prophecies of old. The cry 
to the gates is repeated, and Hades asks: "Who is this 
King of Glory?" The angels of the Lord say: "A Lord 
strong and mighty, a Lord mighty in war"; and on the 
word, the gates of brass were burst and the iron bars 
broken, and all the dead were loosed from their chains, 
and the King of Glory came in as a man, and all the dark 
places of hell were enlightened. Satan is bound and 
delivered to Hades till the Second Coming. 

The King of Glory now turns to the dead, slain by the 
wood of the tree that Adam touched, and promises by 
the wood of the cross to raise them. Adam is filled with 
sweetness; prophets and saints break into thanksgiving. 
"The Saviour blessed Adam on the brow with the sign 
of the cross," prophets, martyrs, and patriarchs too, and 
"took them end leapt forth from Hades," and they fol- 
lowed and sang: "Blessed is he that cometh in the name 



IMMORTALITY 115 

of the Lord; Alleluia! this is the glory of all the saints." 
He brings them to Paradise where they meet Enoch and 
Elijah — and "another, a mean man, bearing on his shoul- 
ders a cross; to whom the holy fathers said: 'Who art 
thou that hast the look of a thief and what is the cross 
thou bearest on thy shoulders V " And the penitent thief 
tells the beautiful story from St. Luke, and adds how, 
when he reached Paradise, " 'when the fiery sword saw 
the sign of the cross, it opened to me, and I came in 
. . . and when I saw you I came to meet you.' And hear- 
ing this the saints cried with a loud voice: 'Great is our 
Lord and great his might.' All this we two brothers 
saw and heard," and they tell how they were sent to 
preach the Resurrection, but first with all the dead that 
rose were baptized in Jordan. Now they may no longer 
stay but depart, and their story ends with the benediction. 
The document is dated by some scholars as early as 
the second century a.d. ; but, whatever its date, the belief 
which it embodies belongs to that century; it is found 
in 1 Peter; it keeps recurring through the Fathers; it 
is embodied in the Golden Legend; and it was inserted 
in the so-called Apostles' Creed about 400 A.D., and it 
remains there. In the story of the two brethren it is 
told with remarkable feeling, and the great passages 
woven in from the Old Testament give it background 
and depth, and make it a sort of philosophy of history. 
From Clement of Alexandria onward it has been taken 
as solving the problem of the destiny of those who never 
saw Christ in this world, and further "thus, I think, it 
is shown that God is good, and the Lord able to save with 
righteousness and equality toward those that turn to him, 
whether here, or elsewhere. For not here alone does his 
energetic power reach, but it is everywhere and always 
works." 1 



"Clem. Alex., Strom., VI :6, § 47. 



116 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

We have, however, to recognize that many "descents 
into hell" were told of in classical antiquity — descents 
made by Odysseus, by Er the son of Armenios, by iEneas, 
and many more; to the north the Finns tell of Waina- 
moinen, and eastward are other legends. All these stories 
are prompted by the same impulse. 

"Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who 
Before us pass'd the door of darkness through, 

Not one returns to tell us of the road 
Which to discover we must travel too." 

It looks as if Man were determined to have some knowl- 
edge of that road and that goal, when all over the world 
we find stories of one traveler who found that bourne 
and did return, and with news of import to all who live 
and love. It may not seem of much import, but it may 
be noted that of all these heroes of discovery, Jesus is 
the only one of whom we can be sure that he was his- 
torical. If the "harrowing of hell" is fiction, it has grown 
out of -an historical tradition, or it has been attached to it. 

II 

Historically the belief in immortality has had two bases 
in thought. Men have had to explain visions of the dead. 
Ancient religion and animistic religion to this day pay 
great attention to the reporting of such visions and in- 
deed to their production. The Lives of many Roman 
Catholic saints and nuns, even very modern ones, are 
full of such things, incredible and absurd as they are to 
people trained to handle evidence with any scientific care. 
One Baptist mission on the Congo river lost its most 
attractive convert, because, during some native initiation 
ceremonies, he saw his dead father and learned from 
the dead man's lips that the Christian religion is false — a 



IMMORTALITY 117 

story which the scientific observer will not at first readily 
distinguish from those told at Lourdes and elsewhere in 
Catholic regions. But for men no longer at the primitive 
point of view, such appearances have ceased to be con- 
clusive evidence. Do such visions ever really give new 
facts, or do they merely emphasize with new force and 
color what men have known subconsciously all along? 
When we know better how far visions are, and how far 
they are not, the product of the brain that records them, 
the evidence of visions will begin to have value. But at 
present we are only beginning to realize what tricks the 
mind plays upon itself, and the part of the physical nature 
in suggesting them and joining in the play. 

On the other hand, men have based their belief in an- 
other life on what they have observed of the operations 
of moral law. In primitive and even later society, a fron- 
tier crossed enabled a man to escape the consequences of 
criminal acts. Can moral law be evaded by crossing 
another frontier? men have asked. Is it conceivable that 
death brings Jesus and Judas to one end and one level, that 
God in the long run groups them together and is equally 
done with both of them ? "Conceivable" is the touchstone 
here ; it comes too near that "consensus" which the Stoics 
used to prove the existence of God, the after-life, divina- 
tion, and other things. 

If it is difficult to believe in life beyond the grave, is it 
less difficult to disbelieve in it? "Neither with the cursed 
things, nor without them," is a man's proverb on women, 
quoted by Aristophanes. We may not be able to manage 
with this doctrine of immortality, but we cannot manage 
without it. With the fullest realization of its difficul- 
ties — not merely those of the head but those of the heart 
too — men and women, grown and deepened, in whose 
natures humanity is most thoroughly and essentially 
human, have held the faith that God does not play with 



118 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

us as children with sand castles, building elaborately and 
content to see the waves wash all away,* playing not with 
senseless sand, but with sentient natures like his own. 
If he could so play, surely he would be inferior even to 
ordinary men, how much more to the best and deepest, 
those trained and intelligent natures who have been 
taught in the school of love and pain and have learned 
there the value of the soul. 



Ill 



If we are to correct our own random impressions of 
haste or despair, it must be by watching the movement 
of thought over the centuries, and among those peoples 
who have shaped the thinking of our modern world. 
Accident plays a large part in history, but less than else- 
where in the progress of thought. We have remarked 
already the great tendencies in religion to emphasize the 
oneness of all regions of experience, the personality of 
God, righteousness, and the personality of the individual 
man. The last includes immortality. 

Homer's picture of the world beyond is famous, a nerve- 
less, noiseless existence, existence as it were without life, 
in a darkness that allowed only a bare consciousness of 
discomfort, without distinctions between good or bad, 
brave or coward. Sons-in-law of gods reached Happy 
Isles, at some stage in the history of epic poetry; but 
the picture of the dead as drawn by Odysseus is cheerless 
and hopeless. 

With the development of the Greek cities in Asia Minor 
in the eighth century B.C. and the simultaneous awaken- 
ing of the Greek mind all over the world and in every 
realm of thought, we find side by side with the great intel- 
lectual movement, associated with* the philosophers and 



2 Homer, Iliad, XV.-362-364. 



IMMORTALITY 119 

inquirers of Ionia, another movement chiefly upon Euro- 
pean soil. The cults of Orpheus and Dionysus, the mys- 
teries of Eleusis with their teaching of another life, and 
of the need of preparation for it, may not have appealed — 
did not, so far as we know, appeal — to the circles of Thales 
and Heraclitus; but they captured a great constituency 
precisely in the period when men began to frame deeper 
thoughts and to see things with clearer edges. The Greek 
always leaned to a consciousness of his own claims on 
society and on Nature ; and, though at this period he still 
had a vivid local patriotism, he was beginning to be more 
definitely than ever an individual. The emphasis on mys- 
teries in that age implies the individual conscious of him- 
self and provident of his own future after death. "Happy 
is he that has seen the doing of sacred things, the awful 
rites (of Eleusis) ; he that is not initiate and he that has 
part therein, have never the same lot, when dead and in 
dank darkness below." 8 Such language is unmistak- 
able. 

On the whole the philosophic mind rejected the cults 
along with the myths of the gods and much else; and 
the movement of the fifth century, with its thorough- 
going rationalism and its reference of everything to the 
standard of each individual, was not one to reestablish 
anything. Two names stand out at this point — names of 
representative and formative men — Euripides and Plato. 
Euripides combined in a very impressive way two strains 
not easily reconciled — he had a mind relentlessly logical, 
loyal to the new standards of thought, exigent to the 
bitter end for demonstration (his own word) and with 
it a faculty for passionate feeling. His insight into the 
human heart brings him to the verge of belief in im- 
mortality; he hovers about the problem — "who knows if 
life itself indeed be death?" — but he will not recognize 



3 Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 474-482. 



120 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

the craving of the heart for the object of its love as 
evidence. His reason checks his feeling", and he leaves 
the question in suspense. We have "no experience of 
death," he says, 4 and hearsay evidence is guesswork — 
"borne upon tales we drift, drift idly." God also for him 
is not demonstrated. 

Plato, however, does not reject this intuition that there 
must be something beyond, though he sees as clearly that 
intuition is not demonstration. What he has to say on 
immortality he casts in the form of myth — "I do not 
mean to affirm that the description which I have given 
of the soul and her mansions is exactly true — a man of 
sense ought hardly to say that. But I do say that, inas- 
much as the soul is shown to be immortal, he may ven- 
ture to think that something of the kind is true. The 
venture is a glorious one." 5 But Plato strongly puts 
forward another doctrine about the soul, which it is said 
has an eastern origin — the transmigration of souls, and 
he binds it up with immortality. Euripides had known 
of this doctrine — it was in the air, for it seems that the 
Orphics taught it — tout he would not have to do with it; 
it was a fancy without evidence of any kind, and he let 
it alone. 

How far thought and the conditions of national ^nd 
social life react and are each other's product, it is always 
hard to say, but a heightened individualism is the mark 
of the age of Plato and his successors. The philosophers 
who shaped the thinking of later Greece were nearly all 
unmarried and childless, many of them foreigners, volun- 
tary exiles from their native places, some even barbarians, 
it would seem — men in short, who lacked many of the 
spiritual ties that make us thoroughly human. Their 
thought is individualistic — Stoic or Epicurean, Cynic or 



* Euripides, Hippolytus, 19M97. 
6 Plato, Phaedo, 114. 



IMMORTALITY 121 

Sceptic, it is all one. The city-state, shaken and virtually 
obsolete amid the great empires, was no longer a religion, 
so to speak, but a club, hardly an object of loyalty at all. 
If the transmigration of souls was at all widely believed 
in Greece — it is hard to say whether it was — it also 
worked against the social sense. The old primitive an- 
cestor-worship, impossible now, had at least held the 
family together, as the city cult had held the city. But 
the transmigration of souls meant that all family ties 
were accidental and transitory — each man for himself, as 
he made his next reincarnation, or chose it in some Pla- 
tonic other world. 6 Whether the Epicurean offered a 
better or a worse prospect in utter resolution into ele- 
mental atoms, who shall say? Resolution into atoms even 
on the showing of the religious might be better than the 
ceaseless "sorrowful weary wheel" 7 and eternal redying 
as someone called it. Even the Stoics were sure neither 
of gods nor the soul; God might be Fate or the Universe 
or Nature — it did not matter, such knowledge was need- 
less. 8 And as for the soul, why fear change into some- 
thing else which the cosmos needs? passing into "the 
dear and the kin, the elements?" You had no son before; 
you have none now; are you worse off? they asked. Yes, 
one is worse off, for one's soul has grown in insight, in 
depth and capacity for God-given joy and service. Tardus 
labor non sit cassus! 

Immortality had no secure foundation in Greek 
thought; and men and women turned to Oriental cults 
which offered certainty, to god or goddess as might be, 
with whom some kind of sure relation could be estab- 
lished. There were weak points in the polytheism of 
these cults and in their want of connection with either 
morals or truth. But, as we have seen in a previous 

• Cf . Republic, X, the story of Er, the son of Armenios. 

7 A phrase on one of the gold tablets found at Petelia. 

8 Justin Martyr, Trypho, c. 2. 



122 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

chapter, men were in a hurry. Eastern astrology with 
its suggestion of a scientific basis, the immemorial an- 
tiquity, the impressiveness, the very cost and intricacy 
of Eastern religions, influenced them; above all, the 
assurance that that way lay the saving of the soul. If 
the mystery religions of the Roman Empire afford a piti- 
ful exhibition of the decline of the human mind, it re- 
mains that they bear witness to man's unconquerable 
instinct for immortality. Philosophy had ignored it, and 
this was Nature's vengeance for a forgotten truth. 

IV 

When we turn to the Hebrews, it is quite another story. 
The Old Testament, as it is commonly read, is a con- 
fusion, but historical criticism finds a pathway. It then 
appears that there are there two groups of conflicting 
ideas, one derived ultimately from ancestor worship, the 
other and later from monotheistic belief.* The emphasis 
of the great prophets was upon the fact of God; on the 
earthward side they rather looked to the nation and its 
destiny than dealt with the individual and his hopes and 
fears as to another life. They did a great work, for 
they drove Israel out of the notion of a local and tribal 
god into the awful thought of One God who rules all the 
ends of the earth, who taketh up the isles as a very little 
thing. There are gleams of recognition of what such 
a God means for the individual. The poet, who wrote 
Job, "reflects all the darkness of the popular doctrine 
and likewise exhibits the actual steps, whereby the human 
spirit rose gradually to the apprehension that man's soul 
is capable of a divine life beyond the grave." Even in 
death he feels it is "still capable of the highest spiritual 
activities, though without the body," but he seems not 



•Cf. R. H. Charles, Eschatology, p. 52. 



IMMORTALITY 123 

to hint that this higher life may be endless, natural in- 
ference as it seems to us from the train of his thought." 
The 73rd and 139th Psalms and the inserted 26th chapter 
of Isaiah show a later and higher development. But 
generally in the Old Testament Sheol is the abode of the 
dead, with various modifications, as men's thoughts of 
God and the hereafter grew deeper and clearer. 

It was at one time a fashion to attribute much of later 
Jewish thought on our subject to Persian influence, but 
scholars today seem much less ready to assert this. 11 It 
is rather during the Macedonian period that the great 
step forward was taken from One God to his concern 
with each man forever. Many notions were afloat as to 
the Messiah and his kingdom, the destinies of nations and 
of men, and these were held unevenly as thoughts are — 
here discarded by the careless, there outgrown by the 
profounder spirits, in another region cherished by the 
pious as an inheritance side by side with other thoughts 
and hopes incompatible with them. The apocalyptic 
books, more familiar today than ever before, give, in 
their very confusion, a clue to the growth of Jewish 
thought down to the times of Jesus and his disciples. 
They show how a people deeply harassed by problems of 
national history and national future, persecuted by for- 
eign rulers and abused by native princes, growingly con- 
scious of the individual and all the ties of love and the 
implications of right and wrong, came to cast more and 
more on God and his more or less direct action upon the 
world. A Davidic king might be raised up to rescue 
Israel, or he might not ; for the Anointed One is ignored 
by some apocalyptic writers, or kept in the background, 
while others make him of the highest import and speak 



10 R. H. Charles, Eschotology, pp. 71, 72. 

11 J. H. Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, p. 321, quoting Bousset and 
agreeing that Zarathushtra practically is to be struck out of the list of the 
prophets who contributed to the growth of Israel's religion. 



124 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

of him as preexistent in heavenly state, the companion 
of God and the angels, at God's right hand, the super- 
natural Son of Man. 12 

The uncertainty about the Messiah is reflected in the 
various forecasts given of his kingdom. 13 It would be a 
supreme triumph of Israel, culminating in an earthly 
paradise. Then it became spiritualized in an indefinite 
way; the living and the dead were to receive spiritual 
bodies. It was transferred to heaven. A great crisis 
or catastrophe would inaugurate it; a great last judg- 
ment in this world, or in another, would bring the end 
of all wrong and oppression, the Kingdom of God, the 
utter rejection of the Gentile. So much was distantly 
in the vein of the Prophets; and then the individual 
raised his head, and the whole problem of the future was 
changed with the shifting of the emphasis. 

Five elements contribute confusion to the pictures of 
the future — the Messiah, Israel, and now resurrection 
and immortality, and judgment. Resurrection and im- 
mortality are not the same thing. Who would "rise" was 
the question? All Israel? 14 or the just alone? 15 or all 
men? 19 Or is there no bodily resurrection at all, 17 as 
men began to surmise under Greek influence in the first 
century B.C., and is the true doctrine immortality? 18 At- 
tention was directed increasingly to rewards and punish- 
ments, as the ethical interest prevailed over the national, 
and by and by reward and punishment were thought of 
as eternal. Finally, a new aeon or age without sin be- 
comes the hope or expectation. 



12 Cf. W. Fairweather, Background of Gospels, p. 276. 

13 J. H. Leckie, World, to Come, p. 30. 

14 Enoch, 2:1 f. 

"XII Testaments; I Enoch 82-90. 

16 IV Esdras 7:32 ff-126. "Jubilees. 

18 I Enoch 91-104; Fairweather, Background of Gospels, pp. 283 : 291. There 
were Arab Christians in the third century (Eusebius, Church History, 6:37) 
who believed the soul died and decayed with the body and then shared its 
resurrection; a curious illustration of an older idea holding out against 
the Greek. 



IMMORTALITY 125 

Thought has moved considerably, and a Messiah and 
a Davidic kingdom recede; where they are still kept, the 
harmonizing of the outlooks is impossible. In Philo the 
Messiah and his kingdom are very far away in the back- 
ground, if not out of sight. 19 

Through all the confusion <a clue is found, when we 
grasp that God and the soul and immortality are dis- 
entangling themselves from accidental associations, and 
standing more and more in the light as the real things 
of experience and of faith. The Jew has come nearer to 
the heart of the problem than the Greek. 

V 

Jesus drew his disciples from circles where the apoca- 
lyptic books were read and known, where men thought 
in the terms of apocalyptic. He, too, used the language, 
but as Plato used the Orphics ; he said less and he meant 
more. The apocalyptic writers had wasted themselves on 
the circumference, and at the best had a mere confused 
mass of broken arcs. He emphasized the center. The 
details are nothing and he left them ; but he brought men 
face to face with God. His disciples had believed in 
God, in the soul, in immortality, in future judgment, 
before he called them — believed, as we say, "in a sort of 
a way." Afterwards they believed with a new conviction 
and a new energy, though some of them were long in 
working out of the old ideas, and perhaps unconsciously, 
when they quoted his teaching, imported more of these 
old ideas into that teaching than belonged there. It is 
quite clear that Jesus identified himself with the growing 
belief in God, the soul, and immortality, and he gave 
an immense impetus to it ; he gave it life, in fact. 

For the early Christian one argument sufficed for im- 



19 Cf. Drummond, Philo, vol. II, 322. 



126 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

mortality — Christ is risen. Men had seen him after his 
rising, had heard him, had spoken with him, had touched 
him. Stoics and Epicureans in Athens laughed when 
Paul came to the "rising again of dead men" (Acts 
17:32) — educated people did not talk so; M they laughed 
and dismissed the subject, and went away to thresh again 
the rotten straw of Zeno and Epicurus, for Athens was a 
university city. 21 

Can we today say with Paul : "But now is Christ risen 
from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that 
slept" (1 Cor. 15:20), or have we to trim our speech to 
come a little nearer Athens? We have to consider the 
resurrection of Christ side by side with what we are 
coming to know of the facts of psychology, and we have 
to be as sure of our psychology as of the Christian story. 
We have to consider the tricks the mind plays upon itself 
and the part of the physical nature in suggesting them 
and joining in the play. We have to ask whether the 
disciples were not just at that stage of culture when the 
mind fails to realize it is playing such tricks ; and whether 
we must say that Christ did not rise from the dead, but 
that certain psychopathic temperaments thought he did 
and suggested it to others. We cannot shirk such ques- 
tions; and, in the present stage of knowledge, we shall 
not get, if ^we^are in a, hurry/' any ..very^ encouraging 
answer. $T~ 

Guesses have been made at what happened — guesses 
conditioned by our very slight knowledge of the soul and 
its way; and I shall not add to their number. Instead 
of guessing, we note that the group of men whom we 
meet in the epistles and the Acts are the same we met in 



30 Compare the savage outburst of contempt by Celsus (Origen e. Celt. 
2:55). the "distraught women," "humbug," "misled opinion," "fancy" 
and "lying." 

31 If I borrow a phrase from The Life of Sterling, I have not forgot- 
ten Seneca and Epictetus, who, however, took their turn at the straw. 



IMMORTALITY 127 

the gospels, but in outlook, temper, spirit, and faith they 
are changed. That is history, and it must be recognized 
and then, if possible, understood. Something has hap- 
pened; we may recognize so much; and if we are uncer- 
tain what exactly happened, we may note that it turned 
defeat into victory, it put the hope of immortality on a 
new footing, and it changed the history of the world. 28 

But in any case, Paul put the matter once and for all 
when he said: "If in this life only we have hope in 
Christ, we are of all men most miserable." We may not 
yet be able to solve our difficulties as historians, or to 
construct the story of the risen Christ, but one thing is 
forever luminously clear — the Christian faith is bound 
up with immortality ; both stand or fall together. 

Here again, if we may use the sort of canon we tried 
to apply before, we can say that, if Christian history and 
experience go for anything at all in a rational universe, 
then they point to some essential truth in the belief in 
immortality. Christian history, the experience to be read 
in the life of the Christian generations and still verifi- 
able in life today, emphasizes the significance of Jesus. 
All that has past, all that has been done, carries us back 
to him, heightens his value, and forces us to ever more 
vigorous effort to apprehend him. Immortality for us 
depends on the Person of Jesus Christ. 

Jesus, it may be said, added little to the ideas of the 
apocalyptic writers ; but it would not be very wisely said. 
It is always bad criticism to suppose that to the original 
mind words mean at all what they do to the quotational 
type, to the intelligent echoes. So far we have seen God 
and immortality associated, and if now we find them again 
associated in the mind of Jesus, it is relevant, and it is 
fair, to say that we have a new fact. To judge of his 



"This is well worked out by Mr. N. S. Talbot in The Mind of the 
Disciples. 



128 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

right to an opinion on this matter of immortality, we 
have to make sure that we have exhausted the value and 
connotation of "God" in his thought and speech, that we 
are at his point of view and see God as he sees God, feel 
him, understand him, share his life and work as Jesus 
does. Such a canon of procedure would be laid down 
whatever the historical or literary personality we might 
be studying. The word comes from the thought — have 
we fathomed the thought of Jesus? The thought comes 
out of the experience — how near are we to realizing that ? 
The experience depends on, as it helps to make, the per- 
sonality. Are we sure there? We have not under our 
hands the whole evidence in the case for immortality, 
until we have made better use of the experience, the in- 
sight and intuition, the personality of Jesus of Nazareth. 
If it is the developed and not the immature, the whole 
man and not the half man, whose thought and insight 
count, whatever the sphere concerned, then surely here 
above all we must ask what does our utmost man think? 
and why does he think it? and how does he reach 
it? 

It is to be noted that Jesus chiefly speaks of God in 
relation to individuals, as if it were in and through such 
relations that God is best to be known. The magnificent 
pictures of the Old Testament — "Clouds and darkness are 
round about him" (Psalm 97:2) ; "The sea is his, and he 
made it and his hands formed the dry land" (Psalm 
95:4) — such pictures and conceptions Jesus hardly uses. 
All his talk, so far as we have it, turns on the significance 
of the individual to God, and in this he gives the indi- 
vidual a new value, associating him with a God so rich 
himself in new values. In parable and in direct speech 
Jesus brings out the incredible interest of God in the 
individual and his love of him. Perhaps the crowning 
instance is the conclusion to the parable of the lost sheep, 



IMMORTALITY 129 

where he borrows or recreates a scene from Job. When 
God in Job shows the new-made universe to his friends, 

"The morning stars sang together, 

And all the sons of God shouted for joy." 

In Jesus' story this happened for one sinner who re- 
pented. Is it credible that the moral being of a solitary 
human unit is so full of import for God? Could it be, if 
that human unit were ias evanescent as the drift of smoke 
from a steamer at sea? Is not the bottom knocked out 
of all Jesus' teaching, is he not very nearly discredited, if 
Pindar is right after all with his thought: "What is any 
of us? what not? Children of a day! A dream of a 
shadow is man" ? For here is a case, it looks, of "either 
. . . or" — one way or the other — the love of God for the 
single lonely human soul, or the whole race a dream of a 
shadow. A middle path seems hardly possible here. 

Is there anything of moment for our purpose in the 
fact that, where Jesus Christ has been real for men, they 
have instinctively believed in immortality, as if it fol- 
lowed naturally? In the fact that, where love and loss 
together make the instinct and the intuition for immor- 
tality, men, wherever he is fairly represented to them, 
naturally gravitate to Jesus? Anima naturaliter Chris- 
tiana, in Tertullian's phrase. Is it a vicious circle, or is 
it the natural fitness of things? 

We have spoken of Jesus as a teacher with a unique 
experience of God, but if we submit our minds in tall fair- 
ness to the experience of his personality, live with him, in 
him, as Christians have, the matter does not rest there. 
He begins to transcend our categories and classifications, 
until we have to grapple in earnest with the Christian 
conception of incarnation, and the Christian belief that 
he not merely gives us the truth about God, but brings 
God into our life here and now, and that he is in some 



130 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

way the author of a higher life, the Saviour of souls, the 
captain of our salvation (Heb. 2:10), in whom God will 
sum up all things as the goal of all creation. Our treat- 
ment of immortality will be conditioned by our Christ- 
ology. If in the past the conception of God has been the 
decisive thing in the belief in immortality, today it is our 
conception of Christ that will be the norm of all our 
thinking, for on that depends all we think of God. Who 
then was Jesus, and what is he? and what his relation to 
God ? When we have gone so far in Christian experience 
as to give him the high place that somehow he has reached 
when men have been honest with him, and with them- 
selves and the handling of life, the discussion of immor- 
tality will be reopened, but on a higher and happier plane. 
The discussion! But life is action, and it is in action 
that we test our theories and make our discoveries. On 
what are we going to act? On what "vessel," to use 
Plato's phrase in this connection, 29 are we to voyage 
through these strange seas? It may be that Jesus was 
wrong, that all the faith and consecration of the Christian 
centuries were of all vanities the most utterly vain. It 
may be so ; but what is the experience of those who have 
been most serious in the matter? "This is the victory 
that overcometh the world even our faith" (I John 5:4). 
Theory or experience, it is the Christian conviction that 
Jesus has "brought life and immortality to light" (II 
Tim. 1:10). At the heart of it is the experience of 
Jesus — "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? 
Tribulation or distress . . . peril or the sword? . . . 
Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors 
through him that loved us. For I am persuaded that 
neither death, nor life . . . shall be able to separate us 
from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" 
(Rom. 8:35-39). 



"Phaedo, 85 CD. 



IMMORTALITY 131 

The world has little more to say than Edward Fitz- 
gerald drew from Omar, little more than Pindar said — "A 
dream of a shadow is man." But the Church has learned 
a new song; and, however dark or mysterious the future, 
the conviction that Jesus must rule keeps the Church 
singing it. 

"His Kingdom cannot fail; 

He rules o'er earth and heaven ; 
The keys of death and hell 
Are to our Jesus given. 
Lift up your heart! lift up your voice! 
Rejoice; again I say, Rejoice!" 



CHAPTER VIII 

ALPHA AND OMEGA 

Corde natus ex parentis ante mundi exordium 
A et Q cognominntus, ipse fons et clausula. 

Prudentius, Cath., 9:10. 

There was a controversy once, of which we hear little 
today, between Supralapsarians and Sublapsarians. It 
seems remote enough, this discussion as to whether God's 
plan for man's redemption, his device of sending his Son 
in the flesh, was conceived by God before the fall of man 
or after the fall of man. And yet a good deal is bound 
up with it. Did Adam and Eve and the serpent really 
disorganize the whole counsel of God for the world for 
all time? Had he to alter all his plans, and start afresh 
with a sort of second-best, with a patch, shall we say, on 
a mistake? Or are we to say with Plato that "God al- 
ways geometrizes," that his design is thought out, that 
he knows what he is going to do and he does it? 

Of course, the modern criticism of all such controversy 
is a simple one. How can we know what was in the mind 
of God round the time of Adam and Eve in the Garden 
of Eden — always assuming there was a Garden of Eden 
with an Adam and an Eve in it? 

We have to accept our age and its modernity. Nothing 
is gained by affectation. The rather fabulous "Age of 
Faith" is not for us, however much we archaize; our date 
is written upon us, and we do better to accept it and be 
honest with ourselves. We do not know about the Garden 
in Eden. Emphasis on fact, on what we can be sure of, 

132 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 133 

with the refusal of mere supposition, is the great gain 
in the modern way of approach in the spheres of science, 
history, and religion ; and it comes very close, as we shall 
see, to the mind of Jesus of Nazareth. 

But very often weakness and strength come from the 
same source. There have been men whose weakness was 
theory. Our weakness today is to be matter of fact; it is 
a tendency to concentrate on facts, to gather facts, but to 
hesitate about using them when they are acquired. That 
is a refusal of one of the duties which God has imposed 
on the human mind. Facts are to be used. Imagination 
is a gift of God, given for a purpose. Our construction 
of theory on the basis of fact may be wrong, we are told ; 
we have to reckon with that risk. But if we do not try 
to coordinate our facts, to reconstruct them, then we are 
not using them, and we are wrong again, perhaps more 
badly wrong. The great scientific discoveries have been 
made by men with the instinct for fact and the genius 
for hypothesis; but men who were prepared relentlessly 
to sacrifice every theory, however dear, when it failed to 
cover the facts. We have to frame theories and to test 
them; for it is by this method that we advance knowl- 
edge. Mere idle spinning of fancies is quite another 
thing. Work on the basis of our reconstruction of fact 
is one of the surest ways to fresh discoveries. Otherwise 
we might as well know nothing. 



The early Christian was carried into a whole new world 
of fresh experience. There has been nothing like it in 
human history. 

"We were the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea." 



134 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

Our English poets have spoken nobly of the joy of that 
discovery of the Pacific Ocean; a whole new world un- 
explored and we the first to reach it! The early Chris- 
tian had a similar happiness; he was face to face with 
new fact and new experience, far beyond anything that 
anyone had ever dreamt of. He started from the great 
fact of the historic Jesus, from his personality, from the 
largeness and variety of his character. To be with Jesus 
was revelation. To watch him, to see the movement of 
his face, to look at his eyes, to catch his tones, brought 
a man in a new way face to face with the real. Anyone 
who has been on some mountain with the mists all about 
him, the shapes of things all lost or transformed, knows 
what it is when the sun comes and the mists go, and you 
see the real world in a new light of beauty. There are 
friends whose effect on our minds is much the same. The 
coming of Jesus, his very person, cleared the mists away ; 
and above all, his death lit up the heart of God. The 
Pacific beckoned the mariner on to exploration; and the 
death of Jesus has called men to explore God; and what 
followed his death, the resurrection and all associated 
with it, formed another great area of fact that set men 
wondering, thinking, forming theories, testing them, 
exploring God. 

Men had been possessed by the notion of a divided 
world, where the ways of foreigners, their thoughts and 
their religion, were things apart and irrelevant. Our 
religion for us, they said, your religion for you. 1 It was 
a wrong theory, and it did not bear out even the facts 
of the ancient world ; for Alexander the Great had shown 
the unity of the world, and the Stoic teaching emphasized 
the common humanity of man. But the news of Jesus 
Christ spread swiftly over the world; something leapt 
from heart to heart, it captured men, and all the invinci- 



*Cf. Celsus, ap. Origen c. Cels., 5:25. 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 135 

ble natural barriers between men turned out to be imag- 
inary. The great fact was revealed by the spread of the 
Gospel into all the world, that man is man, universally 
the same; with the same aptitudes, the same nature; the 
soul was, as Tertullian said, "naturally Christian," Chris- 
tian in its inmost essence and nature. The common 
passion felt for Jesus the Saviour bound men together as 
neither empire nor philosophy had done. That, too, was 
a revelation. The call of the Gentile and the response of 
the Gentile upset men, staggered them, startled them 
into a new recognition of God and of all that is associated 
with Jesus. 

The new relation with God, of which they had become 
conscious in Christ, was another stimulus to thought. 
Justified, as Paul said, by believing in Jesus, put right, 
readjusted, we have peace with God. With this peace 
with God went much else — victory over temptation, itself 
a revelation of new fact. The power of temptation de- 
clined, the interests were changed, when a man found 
himself in Christ. He had what today we might call 
heightened effectiveness, but what he called the power 
of the Holy Ghost. Paul strikes the note, when he says : 
"I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." 
Further, men had what George Fox later on called "great 
openings," new visions of the relations of things, glorious 
divination of the purposes of God, of God's methods, of 
new forces at work in the world, glimpses of God's de- 
vices and God's ideas. Men found all these in Christ; 
but why? 

Long before Plato had said that the unexamined life is 
not livable for human beings; 2 and here was the early 
Christian with an extraordinary mass of new experience, 
all associated with Jesus of Nazareth. He could not let 
it alone; he must move on to an explanation of Jesus; and 



2 Plato, Apol, 38 A. 



136 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

many were offered, first and last. The writer of the 
Apocalypse, looking before and after, summed up the 
story when he called Jesus Alpha and Omega, the begin- 
ning and the end. I do not know of literary antecedents 
for his use of these two letters of the alphabet ; but some- 
times people are original, and not infrequently experience 
of Jesus is the secret of their freshness of mind. The 
writer coined a phrase and the Christian world ac- 
cepted it. 

II 

First of all, let us look at Alpha. Nowadays we steal 
ideas from scientific books and scientific men, or, to be 
more exact, the journalists steal them and we borrow 
from the journalists, and at each stage of the process 
something is lost. Natural law haunts our minds. Some 
of us are possessed by a theory of natural law churning 
on for ever and ever and ever, with no heart and little 
mind at the back of it, as if evolution evolved itself and 
needed neither an intelligence nor a power behind it to 
start it or to maintain its process, whatever that may 
prove to be. Ancient Greek thinkers, the serious ones, 
emphasized God's Providence (?r/)oVota). It was a great 
word in those days; it covered the government of the 
universe, and there were those who hoped that it covered 
the lives of individual men. The keynote of all Jewish 
apocalyptic was Providence — perhaps the soundest ele- 
ment in all that strange literature. 3 The Christian, grow- 
ing up with the idea, and then brought into this new ex- 
perience of Jesus, was bound to connect the two. God 
must have thought about Jesus ahead of the time. 4 What 



•See Wisdom 6:8; 12:8; 14:3; 17:2. 

* Here one Jewish view of the Messiah helped. The Similitudes of 
Enoch (I Enoch 48. 2 f) — dated by Dr. Charles, 96-64 B.C., teaches 
the Messiah's pre-existence. "Yea, before the sun and the signs were cre- 
ated, before the stars of the heaven were made, his name was named 
before the Lord of Spirits ... (6) before the creation of the world." 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 137 

is the alternative? Can we really picture God in the 
style of a celestial Mr. Micawber, "waiting for some- 
thing to turn up," till, unexpectedly, through the unfor- 
seen action, I suppose, of natural laws, Jesus is thrown 
up on the surface of things, a happy chance, that enables 
some of God's ideas to be fulfilled, a great piece of luck 
for God ? The thought is impossible ; it negates the very 
idea of God. 

Christians have always been amenable to the ideas of 
their times, and this was one bound up with the nature of 
God. They were confronted by what we still feel to be 
the most wonderful character of history, by the trans- 
formation of every aspect of life, and by a great move- 
ment in every people of the world they knew. Small won- 
der they connected their experience with their conception 
of Providence. God must have foreseen it; yes, before 
ever he laid the foundation of the world, they said, God 
loved Christ (John 17 : 24) . The followers of Jesus felt 
they were witnesses of the supreme fulfilment of God's 
thought-out ideas for the world. God foreknew, God 
purposed and planned the death of Jesus on the Cross. 
The New Testament is full of that conviction. It was 
no accident, no blunder, no patch on a mistake; it was 
the design of God himself. To that the thought of the 
early Christian was brought by his experience of Jesus. 
A misguided ingenuity set the apologists of the second 
century to work upon the Old Testament, to prove by texts 
that from the very first God had been telling mankind 
in riddles what he would do. Nothing could be more in- 
genious or more perverse than some of these attempts, 
but they bear witness to the conviction that Christ is no 
chance item in the world's story. 



The Assumption of Moses (dated by Dr. Charles between a.d. 7 and 30) 
makes Moses say that "the Lord of the world prepared me before the 
foundation of the world that I should be the mediator of His cove- 
nant" (1:14). 



138 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

Christian thought went still further. In the Epistle 
to the Ephesians (1:4) we read that God chose us also 
in Christ before the foundation of the world. The Apoc- 
alypse speaks of names written from the feundation of 
the world in the Book of Life (13:8; 17 :8). 6 

The word in these passages translated "world" does 
not mean the earth ; it means the universe, infinite, order- 
ly, and thought out by God; and Christ, they suggest, is 
the deepest, the most essential, expression of the very 
being and mind of God; and they conclude, not unreason- 
ably, that all began with Christ, that Christ is Alpha. 
That is not our modern way of thinking. It is well to 
face up to a conception of this magnitude, for it is a chal- 
lenge, and to ask, if not this, then what? Have we the 
issue in our minds, are we facing the alternatives? Is 
the Church really thinking deeply enough about what is 
implied and involved in that historical Jesus, who has 
remade the world and has remade us ? 

That there is in this line of speculation a real danger 
of slipping into some form of fatalism or determinism, is 
evident. Luther found the corrective of predestinarian 
thinking in the very person whose significance has turned 
us in this direction. He saw the consequences of over- 
emphasis, and he said bluntly: "Dispute not in any case 
of Predestination. But if thou wilt needs dispute touch- 
ing the same, then, I truly advise thee to begin first at 
the wounds of Christ, as then all that Disputation will 
cease and have an end therewith."* If the impossibility 
of Christ being an accident leads us to a strong view of 
Providence, the other impossibility, of his being a cog 
in the inanimate wheel of things, neither more moral nor 



*Cf. II Enoch (Secrets) 23:5; "Every soul was created eternally before 
the foundation of the world." We have here to remember the Platonic 
doctrine of preexistence. 

•Luther's Table-Talk, ch. XXXVII, p. 405, in the first English trans- 
lation (folio) by Henry Bell, a volume with an interesting story of 
its own . 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 139 

less moral than Judas, is quite as unthinkable. The 
strong vivid humanity of Jesus is our prime fact; and 
in theology, as in all spheres of thought, every deduction 
has to be controlled by the facts of which we are certain. 
Historically, Jesus has stimulated thought and specula- 
tion, and has been again and again the corrective that 
kept it sane and true. 

Ill 

Let us turn to Omega. If God foreknew Christ, Christ 
is the fulfilment of God's ideas for man; the guarantee 
that man is not a mistake, a blot on the universe. Paul 
once said that "in Jesus is the Yes" (II Cor. 1:19, 20). 
Ancient religion was largely negative; the taboo domi- 
nated it; and on the moral side "Thou shalt not" was the 
note; as if to be man, a man must be anything rather 
than man, as if the human was all sinful. But Jesus, 
as R. L. Stevenson wrote, 7 "would not hear of a negative 
morality." "Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's 
milk"; "Thou shalt not steal" — so ran the old law. "Be 
of good courage," said Jesus, "freely ye have received, 
freely give ; it is your Father's good pleasure to give you 
the kingdom." As for the powers of evil which obsessed 
the minds of his contemporaries, while it appears that 
Jesus accepted the current belief in their existence and 
activity, he laid no stress on them; instead he empha- 
sized God. Religious teachers have often put temptation 
and its dangers in the forefront of their lessons. In the 
story of the empty house Jesus shows his mind plainly; 
he has not come to reduce human life to vacuity and 
nonentity, but to fill it with God, with the great, splendid, 
various God whom he knows ; and to prove that, so filled, 



7 Christmas Sermon. Contrast Emerson on "the pale negations of Bos- 
ton Unitarianism." 



140 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

it is human nature at last, lovable, living, and delightful. 

Men tended to conceive of religion in those days under 
one type of life and experience. That habit of mind is 
still with us, and militates against religion. Jesus had 
the largeness of range that we find in all who enter deeply 
into God's thought. He recognizes the variety of human 
nature; and his whole attitude is the saying of Yes — 
not No — to it in its variety, not to our casual ideas of 
it, but to human nature deeply thought out. Man's 
nature is in essence quite another thing from the ani- 
mal's — differentiated from it by memory and reason 
developed to a degree not found in the beast, by fore- 
sight, and above all by a far more highly complicated 
social sense, by that vastly greater interdependence of 
men on one another which follows from the far larger 
variety of types of mind and character and aptitude found 
in mankind. To miss this variety has been the great 
failure of many leaders who have sought to reconstruct 
society and religion; they have endeavored to reduce 
mankind to one mould, or they have tried to stereotype 
some fugitive phrase of social life. Here Jesus outgoes 
them; he sees more clearly and he grasps more firmly 
the purpose and mind of God. 

The "promises of God," to which Paul says that Jesus 
is the Yes, are to be read in this manifold nature of man, 
in man's instinct for knowledge, for intelligence, for love, 
and for immortality, and for all the variety and fullness 
of experience that these mean for all and for each. 
Jesus does not miss what Paul sees. He does not pre- 
scribe religion of one type any more than he prescribes 
nature of one type. "Wisdom," he says, "is justified of 
all her children" (Luke 7:35). History has shown us 
how the most varied types of nature find themselves in 
Jesus and grow in Jesus; the artist, the thinker, the 
popular preacher, the statesman, the linguist, the scholar, 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 141 

the musician, have all found freedom in him. 8 Yes, and 
what is much more wonderful, husbands and wives, and 
fathers and mothers, have found freedom in Jesus. Un- 
like so many of the great religious teachers, in that 
ancient pagan world, in India today and in the Roman 
Church, Jesus said Yes to the family with all its many 
interests, its unity and diversity, and its freedom. 9 His 
conception of God is so large and generous that he makes 
religion as free as the freedom of God and as various as 
the variety of God. The Church has its periodic fits of 
nervousness about new ideas and new energies. It is 
amazing to see how loose Jesus sat to many of the things 
that the Church has most emphasized. He lived in the 
universal, while his followers cling to the local and the 
temporal. He has no quarrel with the man who strikes 
out a new line or finds a new truth; far from it, there 
is no one who would more rejoice in the explorer and the 
pioneer. "Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, 
but my Father which is in heaven" he is reported to 
have said to one pioneer spirit (Matt. 16:17). 

Religion with Jesus thus escapes the many drawbacks 
with which it has to contend elsewhere. His religion is 
remarkably free from symbol with all the limitations and 
misunderstandings that symbol involves. He spoke of 
God naturally and directly, as a modern would speak of 
a subject that really interested him to friends whom he 
trusted. There is not the rather artificial awe about his 
voice when he speaks of God that some teachers have 
affected. It is bcause he is more genuine than they and 
has a stronger instinct for reality. Religion with him is 
spontaneous and natural intercourse with God. Much 
ancient religion, and a good deal that goes by the name 
today, we can only call taboo. 10 Whatever a taboo may 



8 More upon this in Chapter XIV. 9 And on this in Chapter XIII. 
10 Dr. Standing, of Madagascar, made a collection of over 1,300 taboos 
in operation among the Malagasy. 



142 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

have been to begin with, it is always outgrown in time, 
and when it is not allowed to die it becomes an obstacle 
to progress. But Jesus looks forward and not backward, 
and in his teaching, faithfully interpreted in the light 
of his mind, there is no hint of fear of progress. His 
religion is not a matter of tradition, of loyalty and obedi- 
ence to ancient revelation, nor does it impose a system 
that will in time grow old. The religions of his day were 
religions of old books; so is Hinduism; so is some 
Christianity today. His is the religion of the new song. 
Is it fanciful to say that only artists and explorers and 
thinkers can ever sing the new song — and people of the 
new life and the new spirit? 

Can one imagine a God who created man with all his 
wonderful gifts in order that he might not use them; a 
God who would really want what men have made of them- 
selves in the name of religion? One sees in India men 
with the cramped arm above the head — an arm withered 
and dry, that will never come down, that will never be of 
any use whatever, that will never do anything. I have 
seen a man whose left hand had nails ten inches long. 
Such self-destruction means the repudiation of a gift of 
God. And in the West we sometimes see men with para- 
lyzed minds calling themselves Christians, as proud of 
the withered intellect as the Sannyasi of his ruined arm. 
That was never God's idea in giving men minds; and 
here also Jesus stood for God's idea. Above all others, he 
who sets men free from every kind of paralysis, intellec- 
tual and spiritual, is Jesus. Christianity is essentially 
progressive, or it falls short of the standards of its 
Founder, who, as Paul says, wants us to move on to the 
perfect man, "to the measure of the stature of the full- 
ness of Christ." Paul sees a progress that goes far beyond 
anything that he can ask or think. Jesus himself is the 
pledge of all this progress. There is no one else big 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 143 

enough or brave enough to face it, or to make us face it. 
Think of the eighteen or nineteen centuries of revolution 
and change since his day; the people who have been 
undismayed through it all have been the men and women 
who had the outlook of Jesus and his faith in God. The 
dead past might bury its dead; they were the people of 
the future; and that is what Christ's people are still. 

The "Yes" of Jesus goes, as we have seen, beyond this 
life. He is the pledge of an immortality, real, tolerable, 
and progressive. Jesus is too real, men have felt, for 
God to sweep away and remain God; and he has taught 
us to think of God in another way altogether." 

IV 

Alpha and Omega belonging to the same alphabet ; end 
and beginning explain each other, as Aristotle hinted. 
God's universe is one. If Jesus Christ is Omega as well 
as Alpha, if the experience, in virtue of which men have 
moved to this great conception of him is approximately 
right, then a light is shed on the whole of God's universe, 
and on the whole of God. Jesus becomes the solution of 
all the mysteries of the world and of human experience. 
He makes things intelligible; he opens to those who 
knock. All the doors are not yet unlocked, but he has 
the key; so that, as Dr. Cairns has said, "Here is some- 
thing that discloses the very soul of things, the nature 
of the universe itself; the stars themselves move on the 
lines of Jesus." That is a great thought. Virgil drew 
a picture of battle, of wounds and death, and then of 
the burning of the dead. He describes the solemn ritual, 
and the torch set to the pyres; and how the men who 
loved them sit by and watch the fires blaze, and the bodies 
of their friends perish, watching by the pyres till "dewy 



" See Chapter VI. 



144 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

night wheels round the sky set with the blazing stars." u 
It is a stern picture, that Virgil draws, of the passion- 
less stars in the quiet heaven, moving on in their beauty 
and wonder, irrespective of human hearts that break; 
the contrast is so true and so awful. But Jesus gives 
us another picture of One who calls the stars by name, 
who binds up the broken heart. So the Psalmist had said 
(Psalm 147:3, 4); but who could believe it until Jesus, 
showed men the heart of God? Where Jesus has been 
real, the stars and the processes of nature, irrelevant to 
us as they seem in certain moods of experience, become 
interpreted by the love of God . 

The world is full of mystery. Pain comes as a surprise 
to every fresh man and woman born into the world. The 
world's wrongness and confusion and death, all these 
things are, generation by generation, for each of us, 
problem and darkness. And there stands a figure who 
says, in the words given to him in the Fourth Gospel — 
whatever we make of the Fourth Gospel, again and again 
it sums up the very gist of the mind of Jesus — "These 
things," he says, "have I spoken unto you, that in me 
you might have peace. In the universe you will have 
trouble. Be of good courage; I have overcome the uni- 
verse." 19 Did he say that? The Christian world, as it 
has entered into the Christian experience, echoes the 
Apocalypse: "Yes, he did overcome, and blessing and 
honor and glory and power be unto him." "We see 
Jesus," says the writer to the Hebrews, "made lower than 
the angels by the suffering of death"; we see him 
"tempted like as we are," but "crowned with glory and 
honor." That is the Christian interpretation of Jesus, 
the Christian experience of Jesus. In Jesus the promise 
is that we shall see the end, which is to explain all the 



KJEneid, XI, 182-202. 
"John 16:33. 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 145 

doubt and pain of that beginning with which we have to 
wrestle. 

"Then the end," says Paul (I Cor. 15:24). The end 
has never been quite lost sight of by the Church. It 
has been the perpetual vision of the Christian thinker — 
a dream that quickened passion and gave new heart to 
work. The writer of the Apocalypse sees Babylon fall 
and the new Jerusalem come down from heaven "having 
the glory of God" ; he sees Death itself cast into the lake 
of fire. In the darkest hour of Western history, St. 
Augustine wrote of the City of God. Bernard sang of 
Jerusalem the Golden in the misery of the Middle Ages : 

"Spe modo vivitur, et Sion angitur a Babylone." 

There has always been a feeling, a conviction, explicit 
or tacit, that the work of Jesus Christ will not be left 
half-done; that he is too great to cease to count, or to 
cease to be; that his is a spirit that will win through to 
triumph, to the full development of human character in 
the individual and in the race; that Jesus himself is a 
pledge that we can reckon upon the activity of God and 
the cooperation of God; that God is no mere spectator 
of the idle course of things, but the Architect, the Geo- 
metrician, who thought all things out, and will carry all 
things through; that God will hold on to his own, till 
Jesus Christ is indeed Alpha and Omega. 

One thing, however, is vital. Alpha and Omega, with 
all that we have seen they imply, are names that Christian 
faith and Christian intuition have given to a carpenter. 
The writer to the Hebrews speaks of "looking away and 
fixing the eyes upon Jesus" — keeping full in the fore- 
front, not a theological figure but the real, one, true, 
vivid Jesus ; yesterday and today the same, and for ever ; 
tender, intelligent, sympathetic, wonderful, available. 



146 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

He means, what the writer of the Apocalypse means by 
Alpha and Omega, that Jesus in glory, whatever that 
may prove to be, is to be interpreted by those stories of 
his life and death which we know so well in the gospels. 



CHAPTER IX 
THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 



Of the discoveries made during the war, the most 
startling to many people has been the attitude of perhaps 
four-fifths of the army — that is, of the British nation — 
to the Church and to Christian tradition. "It is awful 
to realize that, when one stands up to preach Christ, the 
soldier feels that you are defending a whole ruck of 
obsolete theories and antiquated muddles." So writes 
Mr. Studdert-Kennedy in The Church in the Furnace, 
"The man in the street" (to use the unpleasant phrase 
of today) is beginning to think and to say what the 
educated have felt for a very long time. 

If we speak of the Church, "we must admit," wrote 
Wellhausen in 1884, "that the nation is more certainly 
created by God than is the Church and that he operates 
more impressively in the history of peoples than in the 
history of the Church. . . . The Church is exposed to 
the dangers inherent in an artificial foundation." The 
Church had always held the exact opposite; it had been 
loud in its insistence that it was independent of the State, 
more divine in its origin, more universal in its scope. 
Ultramontane and Puritan — it is hard to say which main- 
tained this view more strongly, the one thinking of a uni- 
versal Church beyond the Alps, the other of a Church in 
heaven. When the war came, the panic haste with which 
the churches of this country prostrated themselves to 

147 



148 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

the Government and flung themselves into a nationalism 
little less hysterical than that of the press, was a con- 
fession that in England at least we believed the nation 
to be more certainly created by God than the Church, and 
Pope Pius and his successor did not do much better. The 
long alliance of English religion with capital, and its 
economic orthodoxy, seemed to millions of our fellow 
countrymen to prove that the Church was "an artificial 
foundation," an organization, superbly sensitive to 
finance, and a practical reinforcement of a good many 
other organizations, less arrogant in their spiritual 
claims, but not more commercial and political in their 
outlook. 

As for the "ruck of obsolete theories," men have always 
felt an unreality in church history. Dogma stood for the 
unproven, the untrue, the irrelevant. Lessing, in the 
eighteenth century, had said that Christianity had been 
tried for eighteen centuries, while the religion of Christ 
remains to be tried; and Lord Morley says it is "hardly 
less true than it was a hundred years ago." * What has 
the Athanasian Creed to do with Jesus of Nazareth? 
Does it suggest his language, his attitude to life, his 
spirit? Is it not a hideous perversion? Perhaps 
Nietzsche was right after all, when he asked : "What did 
Christ deny?" and answered: "Everything which today 
is called Christian." Such views have long been held; 
and when they are so widely held, it is better for the 
Church to know it and not to live in a fool's paradise. 

Its associations tainted with capitalism, its creeds mere 
jargon — what is to help the Church? In one body a 
liturgy of Elizabethan English and a ceremony grow- 
ingly Italianate — in another a service dull, conventional, 
and vacuous — both as unreal as they can be; if you are 
not, it is asked, a woman or a corpse, what is there for 



1 Recollections, I, p. 370. 



THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 149 

you in it all, you the Englishman of today? That is 
unfair, it is retorted; think of the energy and goodness 
of the clergy. Once again to quote The Church in the 
Furnace, Mr. N. S. Talbot this time: "There is great 
danger today in the exaltation of religious devotion and 
activity over love of the truth. During the last sixty 
years so much of the best and most intense achievements, 
whether Evangelical or Catholic, have been reared on a 
basis of reactionary thought." He adds that the theo- 
logical colleges represent "a process of half-baking" and 
(on a later page) that their pupil is "in danger of being 
blinkered all his life." That is just what educated people 
complain of; the Church, for all its talk, is not sym- 
pathetic with progress, is not alert to recognize intel- 
lectual movement, mistrusts art as much as it does intel- 
lect, is afraid of science and Socialism, clings to out-of- 
date scholarship and pre-Christian psychology, presses 
philanthropy without economics and missions without 
anthropology. In fact Newman was only a little more 
explicit than the rest of them, when he avowed that the 
object of himself and his friends was "to hurl back the 
aggressive force of the human intellect." 

If things are well with the churches, "they will be 
full," says Dr. D. S. Cairns, "of the spirit of life, of 
adventure, of experiment and adaptability." No one can 
say that they are full of these signs of life ; the features 
of the Church today are mistrust of its message, fear, 
and abject compromise with "the man in the street," a 
feeling that his sense must decide upon what the Church 
ought to do and to believe. No wonder the Church is 
despised. Even a cab-driver expects you to decide where 
you wish him to drive you. The man in the street knows 
quite well in his heart that the Church ought to have 
clearer vision than he. 

Summing up all this criticism and confession, we find 



150 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

it comes to this. The Church has been criticized for its 
methods of organization, for its formulation of its beliefs, 
and for its interpretation of Jesus Christ to the world. 
These are three great necessary functions of the Church ; 
and in each case the criticism touches the Church exactly 
where it has failed to represent the living Jesus. He was, 
it would seem, not greatly interested in organization, per- 
haps not at all ; still less could the crucified carpenter be 
suspected of launching a society organized to support 
privilege and capitalism. He was not bound up with obso- 
lete views of the world and impossible beliefs, the enemy 
of intellectual life ; he was the freshest and keenest spirit 
imaginable. So far from representing Jesus to the 
world, the Church has made him odious to the intelligent 
mind. "Ecrasez Vinfame" and "Nous avons chasse ce 
Jesus-Christ" are very illuminating and not improper 
comments on one Church's gifts of interpretation, and 
they will not be met by pleading the tender piety of 
nuns or the happy ignorance of peasants. Lourdes is no 
answer to Voltaire. If things are better in England, it 
is because English Christendom never quite excommuni- 
cated John Wesley and Charles Darwin. 

II 

The Church has had a long history, and when the 
worst is said of it, it has kept and cultivated some sort of 
relation with the historical Jesus. It has endured per- 
secution for him, and its attention to him has kept it 
alive through all sorts of queer alliances with political 
and economic systems, and has set it free again and again 
from all kinds of tangles of bad thinking. The weak spot 
has been the Church's uncertainty what to make of Jesus. 

It has been devoted to him, but never quite convinced 
that he was practical, never sure that a great movement 



THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 151 

could be "run" on his lines, on abstract ideas, never really 
alive to his genius and his seriousness. The Church has 
always been gathered from the world, and has always 
shown traces of the pit whence it was digged. A man 
does not easily get clear of his background and his up- 
bringing, nor of the unconscious preconceptions that 
come from them and affect every judgment and every 
action. Part of the weakness of the Church in England 
is due to the fact that it has to draw its recruits from 
the English people. It was always so. The early Church 
drew from a complicated civilization, with centuries of 
thoroughly non-Christian thought filtered deep into every 
cultured brain, and many more centuries of primitive 
superstition alive in the fancies and feelings of those 
who thought slightly or not at all. Englishman, Graeco- 
Roman, and Indian must help Christ out with what they 
have from their heritage — "bring forth the best robe and 
put it on him." And a motley thing they made of it with 
"gold and guegaws fetcht from Aaron's old wardrobe or 
the Flamen's vestry," 2 forgetful altogether of his parable 
against patches. To win the world for him, they adopted 
good ideas from his competitors, which he had refused 
outright to do (Luke 4:6-8). 

At other times, in shame and penitence the Church has 
recognized that to the end discipleship is the condition of 
apostleship, and it has returned to the real Jesus and 
learned of him, loved him and trusted him, obeyed him 
at the foot of the letter, and gained a new lease of life. 
And then the old doubt has returned. Is life sufficient 
without the help of the dead? "It all depends," as a 
woman missionary said to me in North India, "on whether 
we believe the Holy Ghost will come up to the scratch." 
Jesus undoubtedly believed this ; the Church has not been 
so sure. It has believed in the Holy Ghost plus. Jesus 



3 Milton, Of Reformation in England, p. 1. 



152 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

in Gethsemane faced a risk, and on the cross took it, 
which has often been too much for the Church. 

The Church was left in the world — a very various, con- 
fused, and infinitely perplexing world; and the Master 
had not settled everything. He had frequently been 
unintelligible, as the disciples told him. He was, as a 
modern scholar shrewdly remarks, "singularly indifferent 
to the danger of being misunderstood."* Did he ordain 
sacraments at all, and if he did, in what sense ? Scholars 
remark in the synoptic gospels some absence of interest 
on his part in sacraments and, indeed, the habit of mind 
that does not care for them. Did he "found" a "church," 
and what did he conceive it to be, if he did? What were 
its functions, its rights, its charter? Scholars debate 
these points, and often decide against ecclesiastical tradi- 
tion. "The thought of founding a church," says Weinel, 
"had been even more absent from Jesus' mind than it 
was from Paul's." He must have foreseen some outcome 
from the intimacy of his disciples, some eventual tend- 
ency to organization; did he ignore it, and if so, why? 
Because it did not matter? Because he believed that the 
Holy Ghost might be trusted to guide them in all the 
organization they would need? Because he believed that 
a living faith needs no special methods, that God fulfils 
himself in many ways? 

Let us leave questions for a while and see what our 
records tell us about the earliest Christians and their 
attempts to work together. 

Ill 

We may begin with St. Paul, who is our first literary 
authority on the Church and its character and purposes. 
Putting together what he says and implies, we find that 



•J. H. Leckie, The World to Come, p. 23. 



THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 153 

the churches in his day were not, as a rule, composed of 
very desirable people ; they lacked refinement and culture. 
"The social aspect of a Christian Church," says a great 
Scottish divine, 4 "must have been in many cases very like 
that of a small dissenting congregation in an English 
town where dissent is feeble." Add to this some of the 
features of a church in India or China, gathered from 
the heathen. The Corinthian Church" was full of quar- 
reling — not merely about belief and practice, but about 
more concrete things, which the members took to the law 
courts ; and there were worse scandals still. The cheaper 
types of Greek, who formed the majority, had all the 
defects of the Greek mind, but little, it would seem, of 
its grandeur, and the Church bristled with every kind of 
wrongheadedness. Its members came from Judaism and 
heathenism. There were actual Jews, and Judaizers 
as well — perhaps these were the party which so blandly 
proclaimed "We are of Christ" ; Christ had not announced 
any break with Jewish law, and had thereby set an 
example which they at least were upholding. There were 
ascetics and vegetarians, following lines of holiness which 
the whole world had recognized for centuries as the gist 
of all religion. On the other hand, there was a "Spirit" 
party, which, it now appears more and more, bore only 
too striking a likeness to groups in the mystery religions 
of the day — they were what in our times is called "psy- 
chopathic," subject to trances and visions and ecstatic 
speech with "tongues" (tongues unknown to gram- 
marians or lexicographers, and of no value to anyone) ; 
they had revelations, and they prophesied endlessly. 
Allied with this party, or perhaps at variance with it, 
but certainly akin to it, were the antinomians, set free 
from the body, living in the spirit, and therefore free to 



* Principal Rainy, The Ancient Catholic Church, p. 29. 

• On this Church, see Kirsopp Lake, Earlier Epistles of St. Paul, 
ch. IV. 



154 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

let the body have its pleasures while the soul rose superior 
to them — people emancipated from ordinary laws and 
conventions. As one comes to understand them, men and 
women, there is no wonder that in a city like Corinth 
Paul emphasizes that in dress and manners a Christian's 
first duty is to be conventional. Theosophy of one kind 
and another flourished, and every other kind of crotchet 
■ — baptism for the dead being one of them — in an atmos- 
phere of sloppy thinking. Magical conceptions of reli- 
gion were bound to be present in a community gathered 
from that world. 

With such a medley of religious ideas, there were the 
most widely differing traditions of government. A 
Church recruited from all the world must expect to have 
differences of system and tradition. The Church had 
grown up like Jesus himself in the synagogue; and from 
the descriptions of the procedure of synagogue worship 
which the gospels give us, and those of the early Church, 
which we find in St. Paul's epistles, in the teaching of the 
Apostles, in Pliny's rescript to Trajan (about A.D. 112), 
in Justin (about A.D. 150) and in Tertullian (about A.D. 
200), it is clear that the earliest Christians, when they 
left the synagogue or were turned out of it, followed in 
their new association (it might be more colorless to say, 
their new room) the lines along which they had always 
been accustomed to worship, and regulated their pro- 
cedure much as they had always done, adding by the sec- 
ond century to the books read aloud the "memoirs of the 
apostles." 6 But many beside Jews of the Dispersion, 
trained in spiritual worship and used to synagogue con- 
trol, came into the Church, and they, too, had traditions 
and habits. All sorts of systems have been recognized 
here and there in the story, and, if in some cases mis- 
takenly, still variety is proved up to the hilt. 



Justin, First Apology, 61, 62 ff. 



THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 155 

Not to make a long story of it, the government of vil- 
lage elders has been detected in the Seven, the succession 
of the next of kin in the predominance of James in Acts 
and of other relatives of Jesus, whose names and strange 
story are preserved for us by Eusebius. 7 The Gentile 
sick and burial clubs with their presidents and overseers 
are traced in the government of the Church; the word 
iiria-KOTTos hints as much, and the fact that burial grounds 
were the first church property goes a long way to confirm 
it. (Ne sint areae! "No burial grounds!" is one of the 
first anti-Christian war-cries.) Roman governors could, 
and it appears did, allow Christian groups a recognition 
as burial clubs, which they could not give on any other 
basis of association. Here and there a great man joined 
the Christians with his household; he ruled, as he had 
done before, in his own familia, and "the church in his 
house" would probably obey him as readily as it had done 
while they were all pagans ; he would hardly register his 
household as a burial club and it was scarcely a syna- 
gogue. Men who had grown up in the civil service of 
Rome, as organized after Vespasian, their minds trained 
to think in terms of Roman law and their habits formed 
in government offices, however loyally they accepted what 
they found in the Church, were bound to modify it. 
Their position would count, and their unconscious ways 
of thought still more. How much they influenced their 
new environment stands out amazingly when we compare 
the Church we find in Paul's letters with that in Cyp- 
rian's, scarcely two centuries later; every fundamental 
idea or tradition has vanished or is bewilderingly trans- 
formed, legalized past belief. 

Put the two pictures together — the Corinthian recruits 
with their wild religious ideas and plenty of other people 



7 Church History, III, 20; giving an extract from Hegesippus (whom he 
puts in the reign of Hadrian, a.d. 117-138). 



156 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

of the kind — and the decent serious men with a turn for 
order in procedure and sanity in thinking. Link the un- 
conventional and the conventional as we have seen them, 
and ask who or what is to weld them, who is to rule, or 
is the movement to break up? Will the Holy Ghost 
suffice? For now the problems of the Church begin. 

Danger lay in three directions. The honest group- 
leader, Philemon or Titus or Flavius Clemens (the Em- 
peror Domitian's Christian cousin), found himself con- 
fronted with prophets, with thinkers, and with men whose 
religious ideas all cames from the Greek mysteries. The 
types are distinct but not mutually exclusive. 

Many great religious movements have seen the prophets 
reappear and have owed them great debts. "Built upon 
the foundation of the apostles and prophets" says Paul 
(Eph. 2:20). Men of insight and fervor and power are 
among them ; men, too, with other gifts less valuable but 
more immediately noticeable — men ecstatic, fanciful, and 
unreliable, creatures of mood and impulse — men of 
trances' and visions, who "speak with tongues." They 
have remarkable power over assemblies ; they carry them 
away; the mood of the prophet, his frenzy, may sweep 
from man to man, may capture the crowd ; reason and its 
inhibitions are lost; and there is no telling what the out- 
come may be. 

Paul makes th$ curious confession that he himself 
"speaks with tongues more than them all" (1 Cor. 14:18), 
but in the same connection he emphasizes sense and rea- 
son. "I will pray in the spirit, but I will pray with my 
understanding also," and "sing with my understanding." 
He will know throughout what he is doing and remain 
under the control of reason; he will not lose conscious- 
ness.' What might happen when a prophet was carried 

•Dreams, too; cf. Jude 8; Plato, Timaeus 71, 72, suggests that after 
recovery from his sleep or dementia the prophet may be able to explain 
the inspired word rationally. 



THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 157 

away by what he called the spirit, Paul shows us in what 
cannot be anything but a real incident: "I would have 
you know, that no man speaking in the Spirit of God, 
says, 'Jesus is accursed'" (I Cor. 12:3). Heathen reli- 
gion of the day swarmed with men who spoke under 
possession of "spirits" and "daemons," as it does still. To 
untrained observers the psychopathic temperament is 
more than mortal, and the man who has it quickly realizes 
to what practical uses he can put it — at ancient Philippi 
(Acts 16:16) and in modern Congo. There is at first 
sight nothing necessarily heathen about this natural gift, 
any more than about astrology or spiritualism. The 
Church soon found that some principles of treatment must 
be thought out if the prophets were not to kill the religion. 
Someone would need the gift of "distinguishing spirits," 
to which Paul alludes (1 Cor. 12:10) ; "test the spirits," 
wrote John (I John 4:1). "If he ask money," says the 
Teaching of the Apostles (xi), "he is a false prophet"; 
and then with a warning that it is sin beyond forgive- 
ness to test a prophet speaking in the spirit, it adds: 
"But not every one speaking in the spirit is a prophet, 
but only if he have the ways of the Lord ; from his ways 
shall the false prophet be known, and the prophet." The 
explicit reference to the ways and manner and style of 
Jesus is significant. 10 The book calls the prophets "arch- 
priests" (13:3) — a striking name, given in the New 
Testament to the Jewish priesthood (and by metaphor to 
Jesus) ; it marks the impression made by the prophets, 
while the danger is recognized. 11 



9 Cf . H. A. A. Kennedy, St. Paul and Mystery Religions, p. 287; T. 
M. Lindsay, Church and Ministry, p. 47; Rufus Jones, Studies in Mysti-. 
cism, p. 12, who remarks that Paul evidently set slight value on mystic 
phenomena. John Wesley records their occurrence when he preached; 
if Charles preached, they did not occur. 

10 Cf. 2 Clement 13:3, on the contrast between Christian preaching and 
Christian conduct as a source of Gentile rejection of the Gospel as ftvddv 

Tivaxal 7r\&vifv. 

11 The emphasis on the prophets points to an early date for this book; 
cf. Chapter XIII, p. 233. 



158 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

The Church took refuge at last from the prophet in the 
president or 'overseer, the "bishop" as etymology would 
call him. Without disputing over the status and so forth 
of the bishop, we can admit a certain leading of the Spirit 
here. As the native churches of China and India and 
other lands largely pagan gain independence, we shall 
see strange outcrops of what we, taught by church his- 
tory, shall recognize as heathenism ; and a sound practical 
bit of advice for the moment will be "stick to the mis- 
sionary," and it will be a parallel (saner, let us hope) 
to the emphasis of Ignatius of Antioch on the bishop. 
The early Church, perhaps, had suffered too much from 
prophets; but organization was too rigid a Roman trait, 
and the reaction to bishop against prophet was carried 
too far. "Prophesying," wrote Edwin Hatch," "died 
when the Catholic Church was formed." It cost the 
Church endless schisms through the centuries, not all of 
them beneficial. The contest between the Spirit under 
control and the Spirit in free play, as it has been called, 
still goes on. 

The danger to the Church from the thinkers need not 
keep us long. All thinkers are dangerous 18 — especially 
the quick thinkers and the conservative. Men came into 
the Church from the philosophic schools and from the 
Gnostic groups, and they brought dogmata with them, 
fixed ideas which they intended to keep and which they 
applied at once. An example will shorten the story. God, 
some of them held, and pain are contradictories; God 
cannot suffer, a godlike man cannot suffer; "Is Christ 
pathetos, susceptible of suffering?" The question comes 
already in Luke's time (Acts 26:23; and cf. Luke 24:26). 
If Jesus suffered, he could not be Christ, they argued; 



12 Greek Influence on Christianity, p. 107. 

18 All things are at odds, says Emerson, when God lets a thinker loose in 
this planet. 



THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 159 

if he was Christ, he did not suffer ; he was Christ ; there- 
fore he did not suffer, and what suffered was a phantasm. 
This was the result of quick thinking with a conservative 
hold on an old dogma. This very issue caused the Church 
no end of trouble ; and there were many more. Pending 
the results of sound Christian thinking, the bishop was 
the obvious rule, and then (more soundly) the tradition; 
and both expedients land the Church in new dangers of 
rigidity. There is always danger in associating religion, 
and especially religious thought, with law ; law has always 
a tendency to stereotype what it touches, and even holi- 
ness has come under its deadening influence. Prescribed 
thinking (if the play on words may be tolerated) is pro- 
scribed thinking. 

Most serious of all, because (apparently) least sus- 
pected, was the danger from the mystery religions. "The 
kingdom of God is not eating and drinking," said Paul 
(Rom. 14:17), but he was a Jew, and the finer religious 
tempers of the Graeco-Roman world had another experi- 
ence. They had known contact with gods whom, on 
becoming Christians, they had recognized to be daemons 
only, but still real and capable of contact with their wor- 
shippers; and this had been by initiation, by sacrament, 
by mystery. The modern anthropologist sees clearly that 
they had been relapsing to the level of primitive animists, 
weaving religion out of hole-and-corner, taboo, and make- 
believe; and he comments on the extraordinary revival 
of every kind of old pagan superstition and the invasion 
of the Western world by the sham science (astrology in 
particular) and sham religion of the Orient, not the 
thought of the Orient at its best. But the men of the 
day thought they saw further than Paul and the anthro- 
pologist. They were satisfied that truth can be conveyed 
in religious emotion, that feeling may unite you with 
God, that the initiated may in trance have the vision of 



160 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

God and be an epopt, that the holy fast and the mystic 
fare may corporeally make you one with God and trans- 
form your mortality into immortality. It was an age 
when spirit itself was counted matter; and the Stoics, 
holding this ultimate identity and having allowed astrol- 
ogy and divination to be real sciences, ended by conceding 
more or less every religion to its adherents. Men and 
women came into the Church who thought in the terms of 
the old religions. In them they had known spiritual peace 
or at least satisfaction ; and they began to interpret their 
new Christian experience in the terms of the old. They 
came over in such numbers and were admitted so easily, 
that at last their conceptions prevailed. And then where 
lay the real value of the Christian religion? 

Behind the religion of Jesus and the mystery religions 
lay totally different principles, and, above all, funda- 
mentally different conceptions of God. The Father of 
Jesus was as unlike a mystery god as could be imagined ; 
every idea of depth and moral grandeur, of truth and 
purity, of love and fatherhood, that we find associated 
with God in the teaching of Jesus makes the difference 
more impressive. Jesus lived in the open air, thought in 
the open air, and the sunshine; these religions were the 
affairs of caves, 1 * of mummery and pretending and sym- 
bol, proper to polytheism. "Jesus," says a modern 
scholar," "nowhere shows the sovereign clarity of his 
intelligence more astonishingly and obviously to anyone 
who knows anything of antiquity than in that whole pas- 
sage where he says that nothing from without can either 
defile or cleanse a man." The mystery religions were 
primarily magical and retrograde, condemned by all the 
best minds of Greece ; 19 their motive principles were fear 

14 The shrines of Mithras were built so as to seem caves. 

18 Professor John Macnaughton, of Toronto. 

19 Cf. Plato, Republic, II; and the question of Diogenes: "Will Patai- 
kion the brigand have a better lot after death than Epameinondas because 
he has been initiated?" — Diog. Laert., 6:39. 



THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 161 

and a desire for self-maintenance. The teaching of Jesus, 
his insistence on intelligence, was the exact opposite of 
the artificial fog, the vanity, and the traditionalism of 
these cults. It is the greatest irony of history that in the 
terms of these mystery religions the faith of Jesus was 
to be interpreted for centuries. It was not till the third 
century that the Church succumbed to the attack, and it 
was the sixteenth when Christendom threw it off." It 
is a measure of the greatness of the Christian religion 
that in spite of this inheritance from heathenism, and 
much else from the same source, it bred saints and heroes, 
martyrs and thinkers, who still caught the spirit of Jesus 
and triumphed over the danger that swamped millions 
in superstition. 

IV 

The victory of organization and the sacramental inter- 
pretation of the religion had consequences the most 
momentous — though not surprising, when we grasp how 
entirely alien the new ideas were to the mind of Jesus, 
and how antithetical. 

The early Church had been something of a democracy, 
made so and kept so by the lay traditions of the syna- 
gogue and the Greek instinct for individual thought and 
action. An official priesthood, charged with the duty of 
administering sacraments like the graded priests of 
Mithras, and entrusted with the intellectual responsibility 
of deciding the faith of the Church, found its analogue in 
the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire; Its warrant it 
drew from the Old Testament by expedients of interpre- 
tation that sound scholarship will not allow." It pro- 



M See A. V. G. Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, pp. 33, 126, 
251, 376. 

"See Lightfoot, Philippians, p. 261; and cf. p. 244, for hit statement 
that there is no sacerdotalism in the N.T.; it came (p. 260) from Gentile 
sources in the first instance. 



162 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

duced the same effects in the Church that the system did 
in the State. Behind both lay the belief that the ordi- 
nary man cannot be trusted with his own affairs ; his 
political and his spiritual salvation alike need a higher 
intelligence. At the bottom of the new theory of the 
Church was the idea that the common man is unequal to 
intellectual effort, but can have enough of God without 
it; a flat denial of everything Jesus taught. Eventually 
the Gospel itself had to be refused to the laity ; it would 
only confuse them and lead them astray. The priesthood 
of all believers which we find in the New Testament, the 
equality of all Christians, as all alike sharers in one great 
salvation, the insistence on the immediate access of every 
soul to God, and on the spiritual character of all real 
religion — such fundamental Christian conceptions were 
now naturally excluded ex hypothes ; they ran counter 
to the religious ideas of the age, and the fact that they 
are inherent in Jesus' view of God and essential to it was 
ignored and lost. Interpretation could do a great deal 
with the allegoric method, with a strong suggestion from 
the mysteries, and a public progressively ignorant. The 
Government's civil service did a great deal to kill initia- 
tive — a signal fact to be remembered in explaining the 
decline and fall of the Empire; but the civil servants 
were not miraculous or magical beings, and before long 
the priesthood was both miraculous and magical. No 
wonder men were dwarfed; no wonder that in such a 
world intelligence declined, and the Northern barbarians 
found a debased manhood that could neither think nor 
act, a people who in literature were content to copy, in 
political life to obey, and to shut their eyes in religion. 
Salvation came to be associated more and more auto- 
matically with the Church and its sacraments; apart 
from the Church there was no salvation ; all must be in it 
for safety; conviction was of less consequence. Cyprian 



THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 163 

lays down the theory definitely that Noah's ark is a type 
of the Church. He compiled a handbook of typology, the 
effects of which do not, perhaps, even yet quite all belong 
to the past, and this is one of his types. And, unfor- 
tunately, it was a true one. It rested on what every- 
body knew perfectly well. Noah's ark contained beasts 
clean and unclean, and so did the Church. (A modern 
suggestion has been that there was one difference — the 
unclean did not go in by sevens into Noah's ark.) What 
a contrast between Paul's "elect, called, holy," and Cyp- 
rian's "clean and unclean"! The persecution of Decius 
showed how sound the comparison with the ark was. It 
broke suddenly on the world, and, as Professor Gwatkin 
used to say, there was a rush to the altars. Christians 
made haste to sacrifice to heathen gods, and got certifi- 
cates from the magistrates to prove they did so. Several 
such libelli, as they were called, have been found in 
Egypt." When the storm abated, the renegades wanted 
to come back to the Church, and they were allowed to 
come — on terms of penance and at the request of martyrs 
who had stood firm. They had to get back into the 
Church to escape damnation, and penance was more read- 
ily intelligible and more definite than repentance; it was 
something concrete and external. 

There were two reactions from this new theory of the 
Church and the practice that it produced. The Church 
failed to satisfy the ardent individual religious tempera- 
ment. The conviction was in the air, the heathen con- 
viction, that matter is impure, that sense and sex are 
unclean ; and there was the object-lesson of the Egyptian 
monks of Serapis and many more who renounced sex and 
the world. Christian monasticism rose, a protest against 
a lax Church, a new and strenuous way of imitating the 



" One is printed with a translation in Prof. Milligan's Greek Papyri. 
No. 48 (p. 114). 



164 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

Christ who came eating and drinking. Simultaneously, 
or very little later, rose the distinction between the visi- 
ble and the invisible Church — between those whose 
names are indeed written in heaven and those who are 
for the time within the Church on earth. Both reactions 
testify to the same feeling <of the unreality of the Church. 
The sects and movements of the Middle Ages revealed 
similarly that the Church was not meeting the needs of 
the human mind. 2 * 

A great organization, in proportion as it is successful 
and means to be more successful, must have practical 
men to manage it, whether it is a railway company or a 
church; and it tends to choose leaders of the strenuous 
successful type, who can speak for it with the Govern- 
ment and command the support of ordinary people. 11 
Ordinary people and the Government alike wish it; both 
want things settled. The type is familiar to us, not too 
subtle, not too intellectual, not too spiritual, but quick, 
drastic, and effective. The last two adjectives, or their 
equivalents, come in stories of episcopal elections of the 
fourth and fifth centuries; the last bishop was not "a 
doing kind of man," the next shall be. So Ambrose and 
Synesius are transfigured from laymen to bishops, one a 
soldier, the other a philosopher and hunter. The Church 
was not always so lucky in its choices. The practical offi- 
cial always overdoes his simplifications; he will com- 
promise at the cost of the spiritual issue ; he seeks short 
cuts, and in the region of the intellect and of spiritual 
truth short cuts are peculiarly dangerous. The great 



s0 See A. V. G. Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, p. 207. 

M Von Harnack, Expansion of Christianity II, 130-132, quotes from 
Eusebius, Church History, VII, 30, a remarkable (though hostile) account 
of a third century bishop, Paul of Antioch, with "the customs and bear- 
ing of a high state official." When the church deposed him, the Emperor 
Aurelian recognized as bishop that one "with whom the bishops of Italy 
and Rome were in communion — an interesting example of the practical 
in church affairs. 



THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 165 

things will not be simplified in that way. Constantine, 
for very proper reasons of State, reconciled the Empire 
and the Church ; he got control of the Church ; and then, 
resolved to have no more divisions in the Church, he sum- 
moned the bishops to Nicaea in a.d. 325; he sat by and 
waited till they, with no pressure from himself, decided 
what was Christian faith; and then he intervened as 
Emperor — all the world should accept it at once and be 
done with heresies and unchristian divisions. The 
Church has generally had to pay for its alliances with 
governments. 

"Better bad laws that are fixed/' said an Athenian 
statesman, "than good ones subject to change"; 28 and 
every practical man agrees with Cleon. There is always 
a sort of horse-sense about business men, but they some- 
times fail to realize that the gifts required for a swift 
decision in a purchase of barley or indigo are not quite 
those required for the discovery of spiritual truth. The 
official tries to take the average opinion of today, but it 
is generally yesterday's news that he gets; tomorrow is 
not practical politics, it can take care of its own affair, as 
someone said in another connection. That mistrust of 
tomorrow, which so tragically parts fathers and sons, is 
still more a mark of bureaucracy. The demand of a 
great organization for leaders whom it knows involves 
the rule of old men ; the rank and file often do not recog- 
nize a pioneer until he is left behind. All over the world, 
and in every communion, the Church tends to be con- 
trolled by the established and the practical ; and to these 
the spirit of Jesus cannot be congenial. He came to set 
fire on earth, to launch divisions, to put a leaven in society 
which would never leave it in peace; and the Church 
stands for traditional order, a deposit of truth, settled 



32 Thucydides, 3:37. 



166 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

economics and stable society, for all that old men love and 
young men doubt, for reaction and unreality. 

"A real belief in Christ, besides answering questions, 
starts them." 23 One great part of the Church's work has 
been to think out Jesus Christ, no easy task. When the 
Gospel reached the Greek world, it underwent change, 
and necessarily ; for the Greek mind was not the Hebrew. 
The hillside is one and the same, but when it was said 
that Robert Burns chose his farm as a poet and not as a 
farmer, we have a hint of how differently men may 
judge; and which is the real, the farmer's Mossgiel or 
the poet's? The change that the shift to the Greek 
world meant was inevitable, full of risk but not formid- 
able. The Christian was forced to think out the relations 
of Jesus with "all time and all existence." He had to 
clear up for himself the bearing of his new experience 
of God in Christ upon every problem of thought and con- 
duct, of society and government. It meant a clearer view 
of God and a firmer grasp of Christ — a greater Christ 
than men had dreamed, ampler and richer, "very God and 
very man." 

So much was all to the good. But men grew weary 
of heresies, tired of thought. They accepted Greek 
philosophy's preconceptions in the Roman Empire with- 
out that brilliant freedom, that passion for truth, that 
we know in Plato. And the Church began to insist on a 
"deposit" of truth similarly left by the Apostles. 34 The 
Christian faith was to be discovered by adjustment; and 
when its synods and councils met, they were filled with 
officials and old men. How near disaster they could come, 
we are reminded in the saying Athanasius contra mun- 
dum. The young Athanasius saved the situation at 



»N. S. Talbot. 

24 The beginning of it in Jude 3; "the faith which was once (4xa^) 
delivered to the saints." 



THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 167 

Nicaea, almost single-handed, and rescued the Church 
from a fatal compromise. But what were the credentials 
of the bishops to warrant them in settling the Christian 
faith? Paul's caustic comment on the small contribution 
of professional "pillars" comes to one's mind; "they 
added nothing to me" (Gal. 2:6). If the Church is "the 
body of Christ," the "body" has too often tried to usurp 
the functions of the Head. For a defense men fall back 
on "corporate thinking" and "Christian consciousness"; 
but here let me quote Dr. Tennant : "A common mind i3 
not only a superfluous conception ... it would seem to 
denote the non-existent." 

Once framed, there the creed was, to accept and not to 
discuss, a good civil servant's rule. 35 Government fixes 
the rates for parcel post; you pay ninepence for two 
pounds, or we do not accept your parcel. There is the 
creed; take it as it stands, or — on second thoughts, we 
will make you take it. And the hideous story of persecu- 
tion began, and was justified blasphemously with words 
of charm and grace, "Compel them to come in (Luke 
14:23). Faith came to mean no longer a personal rela- 
tion with the Father of Jesus; God, it was held, would 
like the civil servant, have nothing to do with a man, 
unless he accepted certain Greek speculations, hardened 
into Roman law. It was a premium on thoughtlessness; 
and ever since the Renaissance and the Reformation 
taught men to think again, the old creeds have meant 
unceasing difficulties. Not that they do not embody 
truth, but they speak a language which for most men is 
dead. At Pentecost, we are told, every man heard in his 
own tongue ; at Nicaea the language was Greek. Our debt 
to the Greek is chiefly the inspiration we gain from his 



36 Cf. W. Cockshott, Pilgrim Fathers, p. 146: "In England ... as 
soon as the Reformation movement began to take hold and its tendency 
to make people think for themselves was perceived, the press was placed 
under censorship." 



168 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

insistence on thinking in Greek; it is a warrant to us to 
think in modern English, to do it with the precision of 
Socrates and the glow and the faith of Jesus. 



Our story has been a melancholy one, because we have 
concentrated on one half of it. But the Holy Ghost was 
never really extinguished; that Spirit is not easily 
quenched (1 Thess. 5:19). The leaven works in the 
meal, even if men try to freeze the bubbles. There is 
such a thing as Christian instinct and it always responds 
to Jesus. The Church and the creeds? Oh! yes! it 
accepts them and forgets them, and lives in contact with 
the Saviour. This is not the right solution, of course ; it 
was a quick cut, and a better path has to be made. The 
Church, as a living thing, has always had unsuspected 
powers of readjustment without losing its life, and espe- 
cially the power of absorbing new-found truth without 
injury. Council and civil servant, journalist and "man 
in the street," kings and emperors, have tried their 
hands. "Sire," said Theodore Beza to the King of Na- 
varre, "it belongs in truth to the Church of God, in the 
name of which I speak, to receive blows and not to give 
them; but it will please your majesty to remember that 
it is an anvil that has worn out many hammers." 29 It 
will wear out other hammers yet. The Holy Ghost will 
never quite come to the level of "the man in the street," 
but he, when he takes time to reflect, will, in the words 
of Jesus, "rise and go to his Father" and take the Spirit 
of Truth as his guide. The next two chapters will bring 
us further into the inner life of the Church, and may help 
to explain why, despite its accommodations with the 
world, it lives and triumphs. 



24 H. M. Baird, Rise of the Huguenots, II, p. 28; Reyburn, Life of 
Calvin, p. 297. 



CHAPTER X 

THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS 

One of the regular names that Paul uses for Jesus is 
"Lord." Paul's writings are haunted by the word. In 
the concordance there are whole columns of it. It was a 
high word, meaning the master of the slave, the master 
of the family ; and it was a name given also to kings and 
gods. Jesus is for Paul above all things Lord; and that 
he should give him that name is significant. We have 
only to think of Paul's Jewish boyhood — of the syna- 
gogue and the reading of the Old Testament; how at 
home he was taught Hebrew; how he read it with his 
father, picking out one by one the words in the old char- 
acter, and how he would come by and by to a word of 
four letters, and the boy stumbled, as a boy learning to 
read will ; he began to spell it, for he knew all the letters. 
"No," his father said, "do not say it. That word is not 
said. Say Adonai" (the Lord). For centuries the Jew 
has never said that name of four letters, JHVH, but 
always "the Lord." Where it is set in capitals in our 
authorized version, there stands the word that was never 
pronounced, and instead of it men read Adonai. But the 
time came when Paul gave the name to another ; and the 
other kept the name for ever. The New Testament is 
full of the Lordship of Jesus. Two of its most regular 
descriptions of the Christian man, as "slave" and "saint," 
emphasize it still further. As all these names were given 
and accepted by members of the Christian community, it 

169 



170 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

is clear that some considerable experience lies behind 
them, if we can only recapture it. 



"From henceforth let no man trouble me," wrote Paul 
to the Galatians (6:17), "for I bear in my body the 
marks of the Lord Jesus." The marks are stigmata. In 
the market-place of any town in the province of Galatia, 
to which province this letter was sent, any day slaves 
could be seen branded with the names of their owners, 
with letters or marks burnt into the living flesh, never to 
be washed out. Sometimes there were the letters FUG, 
which stamped a man as a fugitive slave, a runaway who 
had been recaptured and who bore on the side of his 
face, burnt in, the letters that told his shame. 1 Paul, the 
Jew, the thinker, the Roman citizen, says he is a branded 
slave — a confession of what we may call the very lowest 
depth of Christian ignominy. Men reach it in different 
ways. "I submitted," writes John Wesley in his jour- 
nal, "to be more vile and proclaimed in the highways the 
glad tidings of salvation." He had not thought he would 
sink to that. The picture, so often seen in galleries, of 
St. Sebastian, stripped naked, tied to a tree, and pierced 
with arrows, is not a bad parable of Christian service. 
When a man has touched bottom in shame and pain, he 
can do his work, as he could not, so long as there was 
something to which he could cling, some vestige of intel- 
lectual pride or even intellectual decency, something that 
stood between him and criticism. Might he not have been 
protected, and saved from some things? No! He is to 
be spared nothing; he is to s<ound the depths. "From 



1 Herodotus, 2:113, speaks of slaves in Egypt taking on them the 
stigmata of "Herakles" to escape from their masters; but I do not think 
this is in Paul's mind. 



THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS 171 

henceforth let no man trouble me. I am a branded 

slave." 

Men play with the idea of being captains of their own 
souls. Paul was not. He had been ; and then, as he says, 
"necessity was laid upon him," and he became a conscript 
of Christ. That was nearer the mark than one might 
think; for sometimes in the Roman Empire the conscript 
was branded too. The term, "the called," at the begin- 
ning of some of the epistles, does not mean "invited"; 
it is nearer the sterner sense of our phrase "called up." 
What it has meant, plenty of people know — the ruin of 
their affairs, hardship, subjection to an unwelcome con- 
trol. "I have suffered the loss of all things," says Paul. 
The cross was still a scandal, the Christian Church 
ignominious, and Jesus himself an unpopular and 
despised impostor. The careers men never reach are 
s'ometimes harder to give up than those that they have 
achieved. Paul, a man of learning and charm, standing 
high among the men of his age and race for character 
and attainment in his own religion, a man with great 
prospects before him, sees everything swept away; and 
he is the slave of Jesus. It was no choice of his own; 
none. Men talk today about choosing Christ; but Paul 
did not choose him. Jesus chose Paul, got him, and 
branded him, so Paul says. Paul's body was covered with 
scars, marks of stones, marks of Roman rods. Possibly 
some of the men who read this letter at Lystra remem- 
bered the day when they threw stones at him, and hit 
him, and left their marks on him; and Paul says they 
are the stigmata of Christ. 

It is worth while to note that Paul's metaphors describ- 
ing Christian duty in terms of debt and slavery and 
stewardship, were all previously used by Jesus himself. 
If they seem hard to us and unsympathetic, Jesus took 
them as not unnatural illustrations, and they recur inde- 



172 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

pendently to Paul. There is surprising severity in Jesus' 
parables from slavery; and Paul in his turn recognizes 
the stern element in the Gospel. 

Paul's life shows in three ways at least the effects of 
the Lordship of Jesus. In the first place it is a life con- 
trolled by Jesus. He and his friends think of going into 
Mysia, but the Spirit of Jesus will not allow them; into 
the province of Asia, but the Spirit of Jesus forbids 
(Acts 16.) ; and then comes the vision of the man of 
Macedonia, and with it guidance. The Quakers speak 
of a man having a "stop"; and a man knows what his 
own "stops" are. Whatever they were in Paul's case, at 
one and another point he was "stopped"; and then at 
Troas he had "a concern," as the Quakers say, to go to 
Macedonia; and in each instance he was right. He was 
told at the Damascus gate to go into the city, and it 
would be shown to him where he was to go next; it was 
to be a life of orders given and obeyed. The Spirit of 
Jesus guides and controls the man throughout. It takes 
away a great deal of freedom, but it gives something else. 

For if the guidance is the guidance of Jesus, the re- 
sponsibility belongs to Jesus — not to Paul, so long as he 
obeys. That is a very great thing indeed. Men criti- 
cized Paul's message. Very well! "Who art thou," he 
says (Rom. 14:4), "that judgest another man's servant? 
To his own master he standeth or falleth." And with 
one of his familiar tangents of thought, he adds : "Yea, 
he shall be holden up." "Let no man trouble me; I am 
the branded slave of the Lord Jesus." So he says, find- 
ing, one guesses, in the thought consolation for messages 
rejected. 

If Jesus tells Paul not to go into the province of Asia, 
then Paul is not responsible for Asia. If Jesus sends 
him to Macedonia, and he finds himself in prison there, 
then that is where Jesus wishes him to be. If he has 



THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS 173 

got his friend Silas into prison too, the responsibility- 
still rests with Jesus and not with Paul. Tertullian has 
the same thought put into military form. He speaks of 
the Christian in persecution. God assigns a man to a 
certain place in the world, to stay there. For some Chris- 
tians, Tertullian says, the whole New Testament is 
summed up in one text: "When they persecute you in 
one city, flee ye to the next." But he was not going to 
flee to the next. He draws an illustration from the army. 
A soldier goes to battle; he fights; he is wounded; he 
falls; he dies. Who willed it? The man who enlisted 
him as a soldier. "There you have the will of my God" ; 
stay in Carthage! And he stayed himself and was not 
martyred.' It is the same story as Paul's, who also uses 
the military metaphor. The responsibility rests with 
Jesus Christ. What a consolation that can be! 

There is another element of consolation. At the end 
of his first letter to the Corinthians Paul sets two words 
which English people run together. But Anathema and 
Maran-atha have nothing to do with each other. The 
Greek word is a curse and the Aramaic a blessing. Let 
such a man be Anathema! That is a curse. Maran-atha, 
our Lord cometh ! That is a blessing. The slave is in a 
dreadful position; but the Master is coming, and then 
all will be well. Surely that phrase is the echo of Jesus. 
How often he spoke of slaves in positions of trust work- 
ing and waiting for an absent master ! "The lord of that 
servant cometh in an hour when he looks not for him." 
"Thank God!" says Paul, "Maran-atha, our Lord is com- 
ing! Then he finds me where he wishes me to be." 

II 

The word saint has had a curious history. It stands 
in a very peculiar position today. We give it to people 

* Tertullian, Be Fuga, 14. 



174 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

whom we admire for gifts of a highly specialized type, 
and at the same moment we are apt to suggest that they 
are not very fit for this world, to feel that they are a 
luxury but not a real help to mankind in any great 
emergency, or indeed in the common round. But Paul 
uses the word saint in the strangest connection; for he 
applies it to the Corinthian Christians at the head of the 
epistle in which he describes their character for all time 
■ — "to the sanctified in Christ Jesus, called, and saints." 
To understand this, we have to look into the meaning 
of the word in Paul's day; and we may find that it has 
more meanings than one, and perhaps is changing from 
one to another, with uncertain suggestions of both; and 
all depends on who uses it. Throughout the Mediter- 
ranean world there was a series of words in one language 
and another representing more or less what, by a term, 
borrowed from the South Seas, is called taboo. (In Irish 
there is an equivalent term, which nobody thought of till 
after the word from the South Seas was established.) 
Taboo means, roughly, something reserved for, or con- 
nected with, a god, in some way or other. Things, places, 
or actions may be taboo, and are to be avoided except 
under proper conditions, for the god will not suffer them 
to be treated lightly. The Latin sacer is one of these 
terms. Sacer esto, "let him be dedicated," is a curse, 
not a blessing. Virgil's auri sacra fames illustrates the 
same sense of the word. A thing may be looked on as 
cursed or blessed according to the god to whom it is 
sacred. The Hebrew root, q'd'sh (familiar to us in 
Kadesh-barnea) is of the same family, and yields a whole 
series of words of like connotation. Among the Hebrews 
the two notions of holiness and uncleanness are in their 
origin practically identical. The Greek word hagios, 
which Paul here uses, is by origin of the same class, as 
the cognate noun agos reminds us. The "Holy of Holies," 



THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS 175 

where no man but the High Priest once a year might 
tread, is rendered in Greek hagia hagion. 

To the Greek reader, especially if he had Hebrew 
memories as Paul had, the words hegiasmenois and 
hagiois — "sanctified" and "saints" — would be apt to sug- 
gest a number of ideas all full of religious history and 
suggestion. The people, so termed, were the god's own; 
they belonged to him and were set apart for him and for 
his uses ; they were sealed, as it were, by him and for him, 
and protected by all the sanctity of their god. And, it 
should be added, they shared that sanctity and might com- 
municate it. 

All depends on the god and on his character ; and here 
the history of the word will help the student. When the 
writer known as Peter bids his friends to be "holy in all 
conduct of life along the lines of the holy one who called 
you" (I Peter 1:15), and cites Leviticus 11:44 as his 
warrant, "Ye shall be holy, because I am holy," he intro- 
duces a great qualification. For the taboo words in 
themselves have no moral suggestion whatever. In 
Hebrew, the root q'd'sh gives us qddosh = holy ; qedesh — 
holy place; qedesheh=h.3Lr\ot ; and unless we know some- 
thing about temples of Southern India today, or of 
ancient Corinth or Comana, the association of ideas is 
impossible. But in the ancient Semitic world, as in Hindu- 
ism today, there was nothing odd about it ; the woman was 
a "consecrated woman," a "holy woman"; the particular 
god or goddess to whom she was dedicated was to be 
served in this way. "I am thy servant, and the son of 
thine handmaid," is a beautiful saying of a Hebrew 
psalmist (Psalm 116:16) ; but in Tamil today, "son of a 
servant of god" is the grossest of insults, for the "serv- 
ant of god" is a temple harlot (devadasi), and no one 
would wish to be her son. It is the character of the god 
that is decisive of the nature of his service. 



176 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

So Paul's word, with Peter's commentary, may give 
us a new conception of the Christian life. The Christian 
belongs to Jesus Christ — is taboo to him — is his ; and the 
character of Jesus Christ is decisive for the nature of the 
Christian's service. "Present your bodies a living sac- 
rifice, holy, acceptable to God," writes Paul to the Romans 
(12:1); and to the Corinthians he varies the phrase: 
"Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and 
that the Spirit of God dwells in you ? If any man destroys 
(or spoils or corrupts) the temple of God, that man shall 
God destroy; for the temple of God is holy — which you 
are" (1 Cor. 3:16). Here, then, we have sacrifice and 
temple; and the priesthood of the ordinary Christian 
comes in the Apocalypse — the full series of dedication- 
words all linking men to Jesus Christ, and involving his 
way of life, not "according to the tradition of men, 
according to the elements of the world," but "according 
to Christ" (Col. 2:8). The writings of Paul are full of 
this twofold suggestion of belonging to Christ and hav- 
ing a new life in him (Eph. 4:22, 24; Rom. 8:2, 10, 14). 

It is worth while to look a little more closely at this 
New Testament idea of the Christian being the property 
of his God, and at what hagios implies in this case. 
"You are Christ's, and Christ is God's" — what does 
Christ do with his property, with what is dedicated to 
him? The first answer is that he keeps it and protects 
it; and here taboo helps us again. In the book entitled 
In Old New Zealand, the author tells a curious story of 
the power of taboo, A chief's food is taboo — even what 
he leaves of it when his meal is over and he goes away. 
A case occurred where, on some expedition, a slave found 
food and ate it, and then was told it was the chief's. In 
a few hours he was dead of terror- — not afraid of the 
chief's vengeance, but of the inherent awfulness of the 
food he had eaten. In Isaiah 65:5 the bystanders are 



THE LORDSHIP^ OF JESUS 177 

warned not to come near certain pagan rites, lest they 
should be "sanctified." So in Ezekiel 44:19 the danger 
is mentioned of being "sanctified" by "holy" garments. 
Men believed that something of the god passed into what 
was holy to him and protected itself. While we put this 
down to superstition, we may use the illustration. God, 
the Apostle tells us, puts something of himself into and 
upon his own, and keeps them safe. "It is God," writes 
Paul, "who has also sealed us for himself" (II Cor. 
1:22). "You have been sealed with the Holy Spirit of 
promise" (Eph. 1:13). In an ancient household, where 
locks were clumsy and few, everything that the master 
wished to be kept safe from the slaves was sealed up." 
In the Apocalypse we read how the servants of our God 
are sealed on the brow (7:3), and with the name of the 
Lamb and of his Father (14:1). Thus the Christians 
are marked out as God's own — "a holy nation, a people 
for his own possession" (I Peter 2 :9) . 

Throughout the New Testament the thought is empha- 
sized that God will keep his own. We need only think of 
the ancient use of names in magic, to realize what is the 
value of "the name above every name" — especially when 
we bear it on our own brows. But the protection of God 
goes far beyond the sphere of magic. God always means 
for the Christian the loving Father of Jesus Christ; and 
God, "for the great love wherewith he loved us," saves 
from sin and keeps the Christian holy in Jesus' sense of 
the word — "you who are kept (guarded or garrisoned) 
in the power of God" (I Peter 1:5). He "is able to 
stablish you" (Rom. 16:25), and to "keep you from 
stumbling" (Jude 24). There is the further promise of 
keeping in martyrdom; for martyrdom was never far 



• The signet-ring and its device are discussed by Clement of Alexandria; 
for Christians with property must have rings, and of what character should 
the devices be? A dove, suggested Clement, or a ship sailing, not the 
face of a heathen god. 



178 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

away from the early Christian — "ye have not yet resisted 
unto blood," says the writer to the Hebrews (12:4), with 
the thought in his mind that that stage is quite likely to 
be reached. "I also will keep thee from the hour of 
trial," says the Apocalypse (3:10). Nor is it only in 
the martyr's death that he is to be kept. For God, it is 
implied, will keep his own as long as he loves them; if 
he chose them "before the foundation of the world," 
how long will he wish to keep them afterwards? Will 
he tire of them at death? Paul did not think so — "Ye 
are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God" (Col. 
3:3). Immortality and resurrection are bound up with 
the consecrated life. If a man is hagios, he is Christ's 
for ever. "Who shall separate us?" 

Returing to the idea of the service of the god to whom 
man or woman is consecrated, we find this also bound up 
with the conception of the Christian hagios. "If a man 
purify himself, he shall be a vessel unto honor, sanctified 
(hegiasmenon) , meet for the Master's use, prepared unto 
every good work" (II Tim. 2:22). The Christian is 
"created in Christ Jesus for good works" (Eph. 2:10). 
The hagios in the temple was a servant, engaged in work 
for the god. So the Christian hagios is not merely kept 
as a curiosity laid by, or a fine edition of some rare book, 
a thing precious but not very useful; he is for Christ's 
use — not a folio, but a pocket edition, in and out of the 
pocket and rubbing up against everything in the pocket, 
stained, scarred, worn, and showing every sign of close 
identification with the owner. Just as such a book is the 
intimate thing, and makes the relic of a friend, penciled 
and corrected in his own hand, thumbed and personal to 
the last, so Paul conceives of the Christian being identi- 
fied with Jesus Christ in his work, used to the uttermost 
and bound up with that service by every tie of love and 
redemption. 



THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS 179 

To sum up, we find surely a richer and stronger con- 
notation for an abused word — a whole series of deep and 
beautiful meanings. The saint is just an ordinary per- 
son, limited, apt to stumble, fallible, foolish — "nothing" 
(I Cor. 1 :28) — but he is dedicated to Jesus Christ, sealed 
with his name, kept in his power, identified with him in 
the common life that is implied by sympathetic and intel- 
ligent surrender to his purpose, and (most wonderful of 
all) found available by Jesus Christ and used by him in 
his work of redemption. And we have to remember that 
the word was deliberately used, to describe the experi- 
ence of the men who used it. Thus it too lights up the 
Lordship of Jesus. 



Ill 



Slavery and sanctity are not sources from which we 
draw our metaphors today, but the language of the New 
Testament writers, when once we study it, is very clear. 
They gave to Jesus a place of authority; if we are to do 
so, we must do it as spontaneously and of our experience. 

What then is the authority of Jesus ? First let us look 
at his intellectual authority. Nothing is omitted in his 
survey. Especially we must note the significance of his 
use of human facts — that the crowning thing to prove his 
authority is the good news for the miserable. When the 
•accident of the opening book in the synagogue put into 
his hand the passage of Isaiah, the beautiful words about 
the healing of the brokenhearted and the good news for 
the poor moved Jesus in a way that men remembered. 
Jesus always grasped the fact that matters ; there is pro- 
portion in all his teaching and all his thinking — that in 
itself is the stamp of genius in any region of thought. 
The modern Jew loves to point out that nearly everything 
Jesus said was said by the Rabbis; it is in the Talmud. 



180 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

"Yes," said the German scholar Wellhausen, "and how 
much else is in the Talmud?" It is all there, good and 
bad and trifling; but there is not that indiscriminate 
heaping together of things, relevant and irrelevant, in the 
words of Jesus. If the Stoics said some things that he 
also said, how much they omitted! When we study the 
books which Shakespeare read and the plays which he 
wrote from them, the striking thing, again and again, is 
what he omitted; and what genius omits is sometimes as 
important as what genius puts in. What Jesus omits 
counts as well as what he says. How much the great 
teachers of the world omit that Jesus keeps ! How little 
does their teaching group itself round the real center, as 
his thoughts always do! 

In the next place there is his moral authority. The 
moral insight of Jesus, his sure touch, is one of the 
things that constitute his Lordship. As we have seen, 
the eventual standard by which men judge their own 
lives and the lives of others is his life. But the center of 
morals, he has taught us to see, is love; and there is his 
authority — in the great loving heart of Jesus. The 
authority of parents and friends is just this, that nobody 
cares so much for us, no one does so much for us, no one 
sees so much in us. Who ever saw so much in men as 
Jesus, cared for them more, or did more for them ? "We 
love him," says the famous disciple, "because he first 
loved us." There was no question as to his Lordship 
among those who really knew him. Above all, his sense of 
God gave him a right to speak. He is the great expert in 
life — 

"The master light of all our seeing — " 

the inspirer of right living, the master of consolation, 
who "brought life and immortality to light," who "abol- 
ished death" and gave peace. So the Church has always 



THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS 181 

judged of him. Ancient times saw men and women die 
for him in great numbers. In 1900 the Boxers repeated 
in China the great scenes that Decius and Diocletian had 
enacted in the Roman Empire, and thousands of Chinese 
sealed with their lives their faith that Jesus is Lord. 



CHAPTER XI 
THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 



Rendel Harris, in his biography of Frank Crossley, tells 
a story of Crossley as a magistrate in the police court at 
Manchester. Those were the days when English hooli- 
gans and English Justices of the Peace thought that the 
Salvation Army was a mistake ; and they were prosecuting 
a Salvation Army sister for obstructing the traffic. Ren- 
del Harris says it was a particular "broad way" that she 
was trying to obstruct, not in their jurisdiction. When it 
came to this case, Crossley left the bench and stood in the 
dock with the girl until her trial was finished. How elec- 
tric that movement must have been ! Out of this bench 
ranged against her — and the stolid respectability of the 
middle classes is never more impossible than at that ele- 
vation — -steps the brightest and most charming figure and 
associates himself with her, in her business of obstruct- 
ing a certain broad way, yes! and in the suffering and 
shame which she had to undergo for Christ. Paul draws 
a closely similar picture out of his own experience. Nero 
was already in almost complete possession of his record 
for cruelty and infamy ; and Paul, the aged, was brought 
alone before him. By accident many of his friends were 
not there, and some of them were away by design. Paul 
had to face "the lion" alone. But he grows conscious that 
he is not alone. Someone is there — and none better; and 
the rest of the proceedings, what are they? A sacrament 
and a revelation ; and it was worth it. 

182 



THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 183 

It is significant that the Church began with the most 
ordinary, and the most delightful, of human experiences. 
Jesus chose twelve "that they might be with him." The 
Gospel thus starts with friendship, and the Church is 
founded in friendship. Jesus was with these men, and 
they with him, on the basis of friendship, of the give- 
and-take that always exists between friends. Think of the 
common life, the rough and the hard together, and Jesus, 
the splendid, sympathetic, and intelligent friend all the 
way through. We have glimpses of their casual talk, 
of the freedom with which they speak to him — another 
characteristic of real friendship. They are not on their 
guard against him or against themselves, as they lie 
under the trees with him and talk on the mountain side ; 
it was all so casual and natural. The thoughts of Jesus, 
in Charles Lamb's phrase, slid into their minds when they 
were imagining no such thing, in a most beautiful and 
natural way. They unconsciously came to share his 
sanity and his habit of peace; and his repeated "Cour- 
age !" (Odparei) became their own mood. He had a genius 
for friendship ; and it gave him the power of winning the 
love and the passion of men of different types, of captur- 
ing their imagination and enlisting them to follow out 
his ideas. This can hardly be overemphasized. Think of 
the names he has for his friends. He calls them "chil- 
dren" or "boys." As I have been told not to overempha- 
size this, it is pleasant to find that Clement of Alexandria 
seventeen centuries ago noticed the diminutives and 
found a special point in these friendly names. 1 

But, historically, the death upon the cross stamped 
Jesus as the friend of men. "The Son of God, who loved 
me and gave himself for me," has been the predominant 
conception of Jesus from Paul's day onward. The Latin 
poet of the Middle Ages, whose verse Dr. Johnson could 



1 Clem. Alex., Paedagogos, I, 5, 12-14. 



184 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

not read without tears, 2 puts the same thought in 
music : 

"Quaerens me sedisti lassus, 
Redemisti crucem passus; 
Tantus labor non sit casus!" 

"Worthy is the Lamb, for he was slain." His death and 
passion, realized in conjunction with his personal interest 
in men as individuals, with the sense that no solitary unit 
of humanity lies outside his heart — these have won men 
for Jesus and have given the motive principle of Christian 
life, sheer abandoment of self in gratitude to Jesus. 

Here, as elsewhere, we have to interpret Jesus in the 
experience of men by the Jesus of history. If Jesus is 
"the same yesterday and today and for ever," if that 
statement has any real meaning at all, it suggests that he 
has still the same aptitude for real friendship — that he 
may have his own friendly names for his friends of a 
later day than the Boanerges and the Rock and the 
Zealot — and that he may even yet enjoy the human sym- 
pathy that can share little things as well as big, the quaint 
as well as the sorrowful, the gay as well as the tragic. 
The story in the gospels suggests a great willingness in 
Jesus to share life with his friend. If Justin Martyr was 
right in saying that Jesus made yokes in his shop — and a 
carpenter certainly seems the natural person to make 
them — we may surmise that, when Jesus invites a man 
to be his yoke-fellow, he knows what he means. We are 
told that the ancient yoke was made for a pair of oxen. 
Can friendship go further than to ask another out of 
sheer intimacy to share one's work, especially when it is 
difficult? It is not everybody that a man would ask to 
share his cabin in a long and dangerous voyage, or his 
work in a difficult milieu in a tropical climate. 



■ Mrs. Piozzi, Anecdotes of the late Dr. Samuel Johnson, p. 200. 



THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 185 

II 

St. Paul's letters are not treatises of theology ; not one 
of them is a synopsis of Christian doctrine; they are 
occasional writings; and the frequent recurrence of a 
thought is a sign that it is a fundamental idea with him. 
He is peculiarly apt to use verbs and nouns compounded 
with the Greek preposition, which means "with" (<rw). 
They are rather difficult sometimes to translate into Eng- 
lish; fellow- worker, fellow-prisoner, fellow-servant, fel- 
low-traveler — these are some of the nouns he uses for 
his friends, 3 and they are easy enough to render; but for 
Jesus he has a very similar series of verbs which are 
beyond translation without paraphrase. "I am crucified 
with Christ" (Gal. 2 :20) ; "becoming conformed with his 
death" (Phil. 3 :10) ; "we were buried with Christ" (Rom. 
6:4); "God made us alive with Christ" (Eph. 2:5); "if 
we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also 
live with Christ" (Rom. 6:8) ; and then, in a great burst, 
in one verse of the Romans (8:17), "Fellow-heirs, if we 
suffer with him, we shall be glorified with him." 

Taken together, they are a brilliant commentary on 
that other striking phrase of Paul's (Phil. 3:10), "That 
I may know him and the fellowship of his sufferings." 
Jesus Christ had to face the cross and death, to go 
through all sorts of humiliations and sufferings, and Paul 
avows that his great ambition is to be in it with him. 
The war gave us many illustrations of that spirit. It is 
the spirit which is associated with the word incarnation, 
the spirit which made it impossible for God to keep out of 
the mess and trouble that we call life. Jesus came into 
the thick of it and bore the cross, that accumulation of 
shame and anguish and rejection ; and Paul says : "I have 
to be in it with him, in the fellowship of his suffering." 



• It is a curious thing that he never uses the actual word "friend." 



186 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

That idea haunts him, as can be seen from its frequency 
in this small group of epistles. He speaks of the suffer- 
ings of Christ welling over upon himself (II Cor. 1:5). 
He does not want to stand out. Reading the account that 
Paul wrote to the Corinthians of what he went through — 
shipwreck, stoning, perils of robbers, and so forth, a 
modern critic has said that, as a mere feat of physical 
endurance, Paul's career was a wonder. In another place 
Paul expresses the feeling that, if anything were wanting 
in the shame and suffering that Christ bore, he would like 
to bear just that; so that, between them, he and his part- 
ner, his Lord and Saviour, might bear the full tale of 
human suffering (Col. 1:24). That is an ambition that 
reaches out beyond the range of some of us, a picture of 
friendship more intense than some of us know; yet we 
find it again and again in the Church. There are people, 
who are ready, who are wishful, to endure the very worst 
for Christ, to help him, to be with him. I asked a man 
in the far south of India what he got out of his missionary 
life. He hesitated, and then he said something like this : 
"A sense of nearness to the Master." At the heart of the 
Gospel is the assurance that Jesus is a person to whom 
men can get very near ; they always could, he is so ready, 
so easy ; he has such a knowledge of men, and such sym- 
pathy with men. 

Ill 

The Fourth Gospel often crystallizes in a phrase of 
beauty the actual words of Jesus given by its predeces- 
sors. "I have called you friends," says Jesus; and then 
the evangelist, again summing up the whole story, repre- 
sents him as saying, "All things that I have heard of my 
Father I have made known unto you" (John 15 :15) . The 
essense of friendship is thus represented as fellowship in 
ideals and sympathy in thought. To share his mind, to 



THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 187 

•nter into his thoughts, is a part of that friendship with 
Jesus to which men are called. It is not a real friendship 
that will not go over the whole of the ground with the 
friend. Paul puts before us the whole gamut of suffering, 
through which Christ went, as an ideal experience for the 
Christian ; and that is hard enough. In this Fourth Gos- 
pel there is the other ideal, which in some ways is even 
harder — the spiritual discipline of sounding all the 
thoughts of Jesus to the very depths. We are called on 
to share to the utmost his full experience of God, to 
grasp with him the mind of God, to live with him in the 
love of God — as he understood all these things. It is a 
call to us to be at once great souls, great hearts, great 
minds. Meanwhile we are very like the rest of the world, 
common people, commonplace through and through. What 
then? Abraham Lincoln once said: "The Lord likes 
common people best; that is why he made so many of 
them." Nobody believed that common people could be 
great, capable of great life and great death and great 
thought, till Jesus called them to all this, and they "heard 
him gladly," common people as they were. It is what he 
makes of his friends that convinces the world that he is 
in touch with the real. 

Jesus calls on his friends to share his interest in men 
and women, and he has the gift of communicating his 
capacity of being interested in the most ordinary. When 
he promises to make his followers "fishers of men," some 
of them think at once of whale fisheries. But an episode 
like that, when he saw the crowds as sheep without a 
shepherd, as a harvest ready to be reaped, and asked his 
disciples to pray the Lord of the Harvest to send laborers 
into his harvest, points to more commonplace tasks, to 
duties which stir the imagination less and call for more of 
purpose. "For us," said John Robinson of Leyden, "to 
ask anything at the hands of the Lord, which withal we 



188 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

do not offer ourselves ready instruments to effect and to 
bring to pass, is to tempt God's power and to abuse his 
goodness." Friendship with Jesus has to carry a man to 
the point of feeling with Thomas in the Fourth Gospel, 
that, if the whole enterprise is a failure, he will "go and 
die with him" ; and it involves less tragic ministries. The 
friends of Jesus have been equal to both. 

It is significant how few names we know in the first cen- 
tury of the Church, apart from the personal friends whom 
Paul mentions in his letters. Legend is busy with the 
Apostles, sending Thomas to Malabar,* Mark to Alexan- 
dria, 6 and so forth. History knows less. The Syrian 
Church was a very great one, and we have a few pages 
each from Ignatius and from Tatian — pages full of char- 
acter. 6 We know that Tatian made a Syriac harmony of 
the gospels in the second century; and we have its out- 
lines in Arabic. Sooner or later Syrian Christendom 
reached Malabar, and Sian-Fu in West China, where the 
famous tablet remains to commemorate it. Within the 
last ten or fifteen years fresh evidence of unknown activi- 
ties of that Church appeared from the deserts of Turke- 
stan in the form of a bilingual New Testament. A few 
leaves of Galatians survived, the Syriac version on one 
side and an entirely unknown language written in Syriac 
character on the other. Who were the missionaries of the 



4 It is not proved, though it is possible, that the Christians of St. 
Thomas, the "Syrians" of India, go back to the first century. Certainly 
the so-called cross of St. Thomas on the Mount outside Madras does not 
prove it. But there is nothing inherently impossible in the story that 
Thomas went to India. For ancient traffic with Malabar, see H. G. Raw- 
linson's interesting book, Intercourse between India and the Western 
World to the Fall of Rome (1916) and its references to Strabo c. 118 
(on the trade about the Christian era and the 120 merchantmen sailing 
from Myos Hormos) and Pliny N.H. 6:26 (on the discovery of the mon- 
soon and its nature about a.d. 45). 

5 Eusebius, Church History, II, 16. 

•The romantic tale of the letters exchanged by King Abgar of Edessa 
and Jesus, and the gnostic Hymn of the Soul art the brightest pages in 
early Syrian Christian literature, to which might be added the strange 
Acts of Thomas. 



THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 189 

Syrian Church V Alexandria made immense contributions 
to Christian thought, but who took the Gospel there? To 
sail to Malabar or go overland to China might be roman- 
tic enough — till one arrived; Alexandria was only in the 
way of the most ordinary trade. Christians went, and 
their Friend went with them ; they could not help telling 
his story; and nameless common men working for Christ 
among men as lowly and nameless as themselves laid the 
foundations on which rose one of the greatest schools of 
Christendom. "I look upon all the world as my parish," 
said John Wesley 8 in a sentence memorable in the history 
of English Christianity; so did these unknown men look 
on the world, remembering a recorded saying of their 
Friend, and not supposing they were doing anything 
remarkable. 

Others again went westward. Who were the Roman 
Christians, who, on the receipt of the news of Paul's com- 
ing, tramped forty miles south to Apii Forum to meet 
him? Were they old friends from Greece and Asia, whose 
names, perhaps, are in Romans 16? or were they strang- 
ers? Who preached Christ to Flavius Clemens and 
Flavia, cousins of the Emperor Domitian — Flavia the first 
woman to suffer for Christ, whose name we know? 9 When 
Tertullian in a.d. 197 writes : "We are but of yesterday, 
and we have filled everything, cities, islands, camp, palace, 
forums . . . all we have left you is the temples," when 
he says that even in Britain there are Christians and 
beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, he points to 
the results of Christian life and preaching and martyr- 
dom, but he does not know the names of the men and 
women. Nor do we in general know the names of those 



7 Von. Harnack, Expansion of Christianity, 2:140, points out that the 
Syrians were a nation of traders who traveled the world. Syrian ped- 
lars are not unknown in America yet. 

6 Journal (Everyman edition), I, p. 201. 

9 See E. G. Hardy, Studies in Roman History (first series), p. 67; 
Suetonius, Domitian, 15; Eusebius Church History, III, 18. 



190 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

who have revolutionized the thought of India in the nine- 
teenth century. 

The Christian Church has been made by utterly obscure 
people — by nasty slaves and washerwomen, said Celsus, 
who take women and children into corners of verandahs 
and whisper "Only believe!" to them 10 — yes! by slaves, 
said the Christian apologist, who were burnt alive for it 
and in the flames, "torn and bleeding," shouted, "We wor- 
ship God through Christ." 11 Jesus has certainly had the 
gift of filling the hearts of his friends with a transfigur- 
ing passion, of communicating to them the instincts and 
the power that made his own nature. 

The means used have been summed by von Harnack as 
"infinite love in ordinary intercourse." Paul sets out his 
methods, in writing to the Corinthians (I Cor. 9:16 ff.), 
and reduces them to a sentence : "I am made all things to 
all men" and "this I do," he adds, "for the gospel's sake." 
There are all varieties of human temperament, and the 
Christian is called to show an infinite variety. The par- 
able of the Talents conveys the duty of ingenuity and 
alertness of seizing the opportunity when it comes and 
of going to meet it. 

Wesley tells of an experiment he once made. It was 
suggested by someone who believed in calls, that he should 
not speak of Christ to anyone unless he was conscious of a 
call to speak to that person. So he rode from London to 
York, played fair by the experiment, and when he reached 
York, realized he had not been conscious of any call at all 
and had said no word of Christ to anyone. He writes this 
down in his Journal, and his conclusion that it is all a 
device of the devil. There comes a man, is his thought; 
whether I "feel like" speaking to him or not, the call is 
no matter of feeling, it is the outcome of intellectual grip 



10 Celsus op. Origen, e. Cels, III, 55. 
"TertulHan, Apology, 21. 



THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 191 

of the two facts, that he needs Christ and Christ needs 
him. So the Wesleyan society came into being, and the 
Christian Church grew by no other magic. The friends 
of Jesus had got his mind, and knew what to do. "He 
that hath the word of Jesus," said Ignatius of Antioch, 
"can understand his silence." 12 

"How did Christianity rise and spread among men?" 
asks Carlyle ; "It arose in the mystic deeps of man's soul ; 
and was spread by the 'preaching of the word/ by simple, 
altogether natural and individual efforts; and flew, like 
hallowed fire, from heart to heart, till all were purified 
and illuminated by it." 18 

The personal relation was the heart of it all. "The 
Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me"; 
"Christ sent me ... to preach the gospel" ; "To me who 
am less than the least of all saints is this grace given to 
preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of 
Christ." 

IV 

One point, further, on which the testimony of Chris- 
tians agree, is the adequacy of Jesus as friend. He under- 
stood the individual, and had leisure for him ; he prayed 
for his followers in detail. In the Epistle to the Hebrews 
the writer picks out Jesus' gifts of sympathy and intelli- 
gence; the verb "He is able" rings through it as one 
of the great keynotes, introducing point after point. 
Tempted himself "he is able to help the tempted." "He 
is able to sympathize with our weaknesses"; "able to 
understand those who are ignorant and who wander," 
and then, in the great passage a little later: "He is able 
to save to the uttermost." That is the great Christian 
experience; it is written all through the story of the 

"Ignatius, Eph.es., 15. 

18 Carlyle in Signs of the Times, 



192 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

Christian Church. "Christ in very deed," said Luther, 
"is a lover of those which are in trouble and anguish, in 
sin and death, and such a lover as gave himself for us." 

Here are a few lines from Livingstone's diary. "That 
hymn," he says, "of St. Bernard on the name of Christ, 
it pleases me so; it rings in my ears as I wander in the 
wide, wide wilderness." That was not a metaphor. He 
was tramping, a solitary white man with savages and 
heathen, through untracked Africa, a lonely, sick pioneer. 
He writes down in his diary in Latin four verses of that 
Jesu dulcis memoria, which about that time Edward Cas- 
wall translated into the familiar words : — 

"Jesus, the very thought of Thee 
With sweetness fills my breast ; 

But sweeter far Thy face to see, 
And in Thy presence rest." 

And he goes on to the verse: — 

"But what to those who find ? Ah ! this 

Nor tongue nor pen can show; 
The love of Jesus, what it is 

None but His loved ones know." 1 * 

Sed quid invenientibus? That is the thing that makes 
heroes. A little later he writes (July 5, 1848) how he 
preached to those savage followers. He had none around 
him but heathen, and he speaks of the awfulness of the 
living with them, in the atmosphere of savagery and 
superstition, of murder and impurity. He says : "I like 
to dwell on the love of the great Mediator, for it always 
warms my heart, and I know that the gospel is the power 
of God." What a theme to preach to savages! He could 
not help it, it was the subject which drew him; he must 



M Blaikie, Life of Livingstone, ch. IV, p. 54; the date appears to be be^ 
tween 1843 and 1847. Caswell published his version in 1849, and Ray 
Palmer his in 1858. See Julian, Diet, of Hynmology, p. 588. 



THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 193 

speak about it, and he did. He deeply impressed them. 
Sir Harry Johnston, in his Livingstone, says he knows the 
talk of black men in camp, the scandal and the slander 
that they know or invent, but never about Livingstone. 15 
It was a right instinct that led Livingstone to speak of 
the love of the great Mediator, and these men saw it in 
his life and checked their tongues. Again, in a still later 
passage, he is in a place of difficulty and great danger. 
There was a strong probability that, if he took a certain 
road openly, as he was going to, he would be killed. He 
was used to danger, but this time he wavered as to his 
course. Then he wrote in his diary (January 14, 1856) : 
"I read that Jesus came and said: 'All power is given 
unto me, and lo ! I am with you always, even unto the end 
of the world/ It is the word of a gentleman of the most 
sacred and strictest honor, and there is an end on 't. I will 
not cross furtively by night as I intended." 

Once again let us look at the Fourth Gospel. "My peace 
I leave with you. My peace I give unto you." (If Jesus 
did not say that in so many words, does it not sum up 
what he did say? "Fear not, little flock"; "I am with 
you"; "Why are ye fearful, ye of little faith?") If 
the Fourth Gospel was written later than the others, then 
behind the words, as they are crystallized, there is the 
added experience of the Christian Church. "My peace I 
give unto you." They have had it; they have it still. 
Jesus has proved true, and that is why those words can be 
written in that Fourth Gospel. So much for the ordinary 
life of the tempted, of those in danger and in trouble. 
Jesus, they find, is a friend indeed; in his pain, in his 
cross, there is peace and comfort for his followers. "Fear 
not! I have overcome the universe." "Consolation in 
Christ," is one of Paul's great phrases. But the troubles 
of this life are not all. 

" P. 365. 



194 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

"Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect?" 
asks Paul, with his mind on another tribunal than that of 
Nero. "Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that 
died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the 
right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us." 
Jesus stood beside him when he had to face Nero; and 
Paul knows, deep in his heart, that when he stands before 
the great white throne there will be One at his side who 
will put strength into him there, One to make intercession 
for him, who is making it now — a beautiful thought 
which we find also in Hebrews and in the Epistle of John : 
"He ever liveth to make intercession for us"; "We have 
an advocate with the Father." Paul asks, "Who shall 
separate us from the love of Christ?" and he surveys first 
the things that may meet us in this world, the things that 
he has met — tribulation, distress, persecution, anguish, 
peril, and sword; and he dismisses them with a sweep; 
"In all these things we are more than conquerors through 
him that loved us." Then he launches out into the other 
world, that world of darkness and daemons. "I am per- 
suaded," he says, "that neither death, nor life, nor angels, 
nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor 
things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other 
created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of 
God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."" 

The hymn book is a great record of Christian experi- 
ence, a library of human documents, a selection from the 
confessions of men and women of all ages. The New 
Song has indeed been sung, and the love of Jesus, and his 
sufficiency, has been the keynote. It has not been that 
all these people sought him out; again and again, they 
have not wanted him ; but by and by he comes into their 
lives, and what a difference he makes! St. Augustine 



18 Cf. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, p. 260: "The evidence 
of joy . . . who has rendered like Paul?" 



THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 195 

says about his little boy that, before he came, nobody 
wanted him; but when he was born they could not help 
loving him, and they called him "God-given," Adeodatus." 
That is the experience of men with Jesus Christ; they 
did not want him, they could do without him; but he 
comes into their lives, without waiting to be asked, and 
they find, in spite of themselves, that he, too, is God- 
given, a Friend they cannot do without. There is no 
Christian experience so universal as this, or so individual. 



m w Augustine, Confessions, IV, 2, Ubi proles etiam contra votum nas 
citur; quamvis jam not a cog at se diligi. 



CHAPTER XII 
THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 



It was Nero, the Christians always said, who started 
their persecution, and a famous chapter of Tacitus con- 
firms them; and in the reign of Domitian (81-96) it 
began again, and perhaps on a wider scale. The Govern- 
ment was going to stamp out in blood a pestilent sect too 
long tolerated, but everywhere hated because of its crimes 
— a sect, too, that retaliated hatred for hatred and was 
the enemy of mankind. So men said. 

There was something absurd in this little Jewish sect 
aspiring to conquer the world. Its origin was too well 
known. Fifty or sixty years before, its founder had been 
crucified; the verb had no pathos then, only shame. Its 
doctrines were folly. Strange religions had made their 
way from the East, and gotten a foothold in Greece and 
Italy, especially in Rome where everything gathered that 
was shameful among mankind; 1 but most of these reli- 
gions were old, and if they told tales as impossible as the 
Christians, the tales had the glamor of antiquity. One 
could believe that something might have happened long 
ago when the world was young, and far away in countries 
so distant and so romantic as to be half fairy land, which 
one would never accept if reported yesterday from a 
Roman province. But massed against this new supersti- 
tion were all the religions of all the lands, faiths hoary 



1 Tacitus, Annals, 15:44. 

196 



THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 197 

with time. Three thousand years ago, said the most 
charming of living Greek writers, Delphi had been the 
shrine of Apollo; and the place had not lost its glory of 
three thousand years. In Egypt were gods older still, as 
classical Greece had admitted, gods old as time and more 
powerful than time, now capturing more and more of 
civilized mankind. In Persia, too, men worshipped Mithras 
the sun-god, oldest of gods, and he also was coming West- 
ward, conquering and to conquer. All these religions 
were united, none would exclude the other, and all were 
against the new superstition. Nor did they only rest on 
ancient legend ; mystic ceremony would reveal the gods in 
person to the worshipper. "Gods of the world above, gods 
of the world below, into their presence I came; I wor- 
shipped there in their sight," writes the wittiest of 
Latins. 2 In oracle and gift of healing they proved their 
power. And a squalid Galilaean peasant was to overcome 
them, a man nailed to a cross ! It was not commonsense. 
Even the folly and vulgarity of these degenerate days 
would never sink so low. No impression could be made on 
the old immemorial religion, supported as it was by tra- 
dition, by the Government, by philosophy. For the philos- 
ophers, with their mouths full of Plato and Socrates, of 
Zeno and Cleanthes, admitted the existence of the gods, 
conceded them to a world unequal to conceiving of mono- 
theism. The finer religious spirits were all against the 
Galilaeans; the artistic temperament, the pious mind, 
mysticism and imagination, found in legend and cult and 
mystery what the Jewish peasants could neither give nor 
understand. All was against them, the better elements 
unanimous, the vulgar openly hostile, and now the Gov- 
ernment took action and soon the bad little episode would 
be a thing of the past. 



3 Apuleius of Madaura, Golden Ass, bk. 11, perhaps the fullest certainly 
the vividest account of mystery religion, by an adept. 



198 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

The struggling and contemptible little Church had 
lost its founders, all its best leaders. Peter and Paul had 
perished in Nero's reign, a quarter of a century ago ; and 
the rest of the Apostles cannot long have survived them. 
A race of epigoni, whose names a later age of the Church 
let die, had succeeded. The first glow of faith was grow- 
ing dull and dim. The Church of Corinth, quarrelsome as 
ever, became a scandal; and the best in these decades 
that the Church could do is the epistle of Clement of 
Rome. 8 It was a critical moment for the Church, and the 
arch-enemy knew his hour and launched the persecution. 

Then from an island of exile an obscure Christian, who 
tells us his name was John, and who may be presumed 
from his local interests and local knowledge to have come 
from western Asia Minor, sends his friends a book — a 
book of odds and ends and ectasies and bad grammar.* 
It was a book in a bad style — perhaps the worst style in 
that age of degenerate literature 5 — and full of the old 
apocalyptic effects, white horses, times, beasts, dragons, 
thunder and lightning and judgment, with Ezekiel's 
twenty-seventh chapter rewritten, and little epistles to 
the Asian churches, and, to be fair, some very moving 
passages of a more original sort. No educated Greek 
would have cared to read it through; but perhaps that 
was not the writer's object — "unfit audience let me find 
though few." There was still a public for apocalyptic, 
who enjoyed cloudy symbolism and confused pictures ; and 
his book would certainly appeal to them. But it had, if 
one studied it closely, certain definite characteristics; 



• His Epistle to the Corinthians may be dated about a.d. 95. 

4 Very interesting criticism of the book, its authorship, its style, gram- 
mar, etc., by Dionysius of Alexandria is quoted by Eusebius, Church His- 
tory, VII, 25. He will not allow it to be by the author of the Fourth 
Gospel. 

6 The simple verse of Enoch 21:1, is the best short description of all 
apocalyptic literature — "And I proceeded to where things were chaotic." 
(Dr. Charles's rendering.) 



THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 199 

when the trumpets and vials and voices were worked 
through, several things of importance stood out. 

The man had read ancient history, and to some pur- 
pose. He did not rewrite Ezekiel's chapter for nothing. 
Ezekiel had prophesied against Tyre, when Tyre was a 
very great place indeed; and Tyre had gone. His mind 
ran on Babylon, which had been an even greater state 
than Tyre; and Babylon was gone. And his other favor- 
ite reading had been in books written under Macedonian 
kings of Syria, in the days of world-empire of Greek cul- 
ture; and they had gone. 

"Such is the fate of Keasars and of kings !" 

But history does not repeat itself without explaining 
itself; and it was evident that he was satisfied that he 
knew why all these powers were gone. 

"After these things," he says, in his casual way — for 
with all his emphasis on times, he leaves his readers to 
work any symmetry and chronology they can into the 
book, and after eighteen centuries they are still busy with 
it, finding undoubted references to Armageddon and to 
November 11, 1918, no doubt, and much else that is inter- 
esting — "after these things I saw another angel come 
down from heaven having great power; and the earth 
was lightened with his glory ; and he cried mightily with 
a strong voice saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is 
fallen!" (18:1). It is very clear that he does not mean 
the Babylon that Cyrus took six centuries before. He 
describes an enemy he knows, and grasps her spiritual 
menace, a power allied with all the evil of the world, with 
all the social wrong. Look at the things in which she 
trades, rich and varied as the wares of Tyre. "Cinnamon 
and odors and ointments and frankincense" — how far she 
reaches! For these things came from Arabia and Mala- 
bar. Gold and silver, pearls and ivory, fabrics and wine 



200 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

and wheat — and the list ends with horror — "and slaves 
and souls of men" (18:13). The great whore sits with 
a cup in her hand, "drunken with the blood of the saints 
and the blood of the witnesses of Jesus" (17:6), and says 
in her heart, "I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall 
see no sorrow" (18 :7). And, explicitly, she is "that great 
city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth" (17:18). 

He defines the situation as no Christian writer had 
yet done. Paul was a Roman citizen by birth, and as 
Luke shows, generally got on very well with the represen- 
tatives of the Roman Government ; he had no quarrel with 
Rome, Rome stood between the world and Antichrist." 
But that was thirty years ago. This man sees another 
Rome. There are no more dreams <of peace; there is no 
peace; it is war. Hatred is in every syllable. Rome is 
Antichrist, the great enemy of Jesus and of God. But 
from ancient history he has learnt one thing; the enemies 
of God do not prosper, one after another they fall, Tyre, 
Babylon, Antiochus; and one more will fall. In ancient 
war defeat meant extinction and subjection; "And after 
these things I heard a great voice of much people in 
heaven, saying, Alleluia . . . for he hath judged the 
great whore . . . and her smoke rose up for ever and 
ever" (19:1-3); and after that, "Let us be glad and 
rejoice, and give honor to him; for the marriage of the 
Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready 
(19:7). 

It is a book of victory. "I looked, and lo ! a Lamb stood 
on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred and forty 
and four thousand, having his Father's name written in 
their foreheads. And I heard a voice from heaven, as 
the voice of many waters and as the voice of a great 



9 The "withholding" force of II Thess. 2:6 (it is not certain whether the 
participle is masculine or neuter) is taken to be Rome (Kennedy, St. 
Paul and Last Things, p. 219). This view is held by Tertullian, about 200 
a.d.; and the Persian Afrahat who wrote in Syriac in the third century. 



THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 201 

thunder; and I heard the voice of harpers harping with 
their harps : and they sang as it were a new song before 
the throne . . . and no man could learn that song but 
the hundred and forty and four thousand which were 
redeemed from the earth" (14:1-3). We have no statis- 
tics of the early Church; were there so many Christians 
in the world itself in A.D. 90? But he sees further, "a 
great multitude which no man could number"; borrow- 
ing a phrase 7 he computes it at "ten thousand times ten 
thousand and thousands of thousands" — "of all nations, 
and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues, 8 stood before the 
throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, 
and palms in their hands," and "these are they that came 
out of the great tribulation, and have washed their robes, 
and made them white in the blood of the Lamb" (7 :9-14) . 

An exile on Patmos, he sees a despised Church, poor 
within and menaced from without; and he sees this spec- 
tacle of triumph. He is a dreamer. No, he is practical; 
his book is a challenge to the Christian Church, a call to 
faith, to courage, to endurance — to martyrdom. Death 
is very much the same wherever we meet it; but the 
martyr would die alone, hated by his country, insulted — 
furiously insulted — in the hour of death. "Here is the 
patience of the saints," he says, the patience of the dedi- 
cated. Set your teeth, he cries, the worst is coming, and 
the best; you will be put to death, but you will live and 
reign with Christ for ever and ever; and with you all 
the people you had to save and did not save, all you longed 
for and despaired of, will be Christ's; Alleluia; Babylon 
is fallen. 

Can we imagine the amusement with which a Greek of 



7 Cf . I Enoch 40:1; they are angels or spirits merely in the old hook; 
men and martyrs in the new. Perhaps Enoch rests on Daniel 7:10. 

8 Jewish Apocalyptic foresaw no blessed resurrection for the Gentile in 
the first century B.C., nor in the first century a.d. ; R. H. Charles, Escha- 
tology, pp. 297, 300. The immense impression made on Paul by the call 
of the Gentiles should be noted. 



202 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

culture or a Roman governor would have glanced at this 
motley book? Bad style and taste, confusion and repeti- 
tion, he would have noted, and the perennial silly cry oi 
the failure and the beaten, "A time will come !" 
It did come. 

II 

The Christian Church has through the ages drawn to 
itself the best, the worst, and the middling among man- 
kind. The Corinthian Church was dependent on the 
floating population of a seaport, with a notorious and 
abominable temple of Aphrodite. The average man has 
always been largely represented in the Church, and per- 
haps (as suggested in a previous chapter) has had rather 
more than his share in the official guidance of the Church. 
Every kind of crank and crotchet too has drifted into the 
Christian community; sometimes they drift out; often 
they develop a certain degree of Christian sense which 
neutralizes their queerness ; very often the Church has to 
exercise whatever faculty it has of "suffering fools 
gladly"; now and then they make imperishable contri- 
butions to the body that barely tolerates them. 

"Ye see your calling, brethren," writes Paul to Corinth 
(I Cor. 1:26 f.), "how that not many wise men after 
the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called." 
Whether he learnt rhetoric or not at Tarsus, he is surely 
using one of its figures here, and saying a little less than 
he means; and then he swings into a glorious and famous 
passage telling how God uses weak things, base things, 
things despised, "yea! and things that are not, to bring 
to nought things that are . . . and of him are ye in 
Christ Jesus." His prophecy of the Christian future is 
more genial than John's; there is less hatred in it, but 
not a whit less conviction. 

Elsewhere (I Cor. 6 :9, 10) Paul runs over a list of dis- 
gusting vices, some reprobated, others tolerated, in the 



THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 203 

Roman Empire, some almost extinct in Christendom but 
still to the fore in heathendom; and, winding up that 
those addicted to them shall not inherit the Kingdom of 
God, he wheels round upon his friends and says bluntly: 
"And such were some of you." "Once ye were darkness," 
he writes to others (Eph. 5:8), "but now are ye light in 
the Lord." The Church has little to boast about in some 
of its material ; the miracle has been what has been made 
of it. 

Jesus Christ drew to himself the "whiter souls," ani- 
mae candidiores, who were looking for God in the Roman 
Empire, as he has since done elsewhere — men and women 
who hated the uncleanness and cruelty of paganism ; reli- 
gious temperaments who wanted God and said so; peo- 
ple who wandered disappointedly among the cults, who 
were weary of daemons and were drawn by the "mon- 
archic" character of the Christian religion, 9 by its pure 
morals and the power its adherents found in it to face 
martyrdom. "Every man," wrote Tertullian, "who wit- 
nesses this great endurance, is struck with some misgiv- 
ing and is set on fire to look into it, to find what is its 
cause ; and when he has learnt the truth, he instantly fol- 
lows it himself as well." That sounds like autobiography. 
The philosophic type came, too, led by motives not very 
different, and gave the Church Justin Martyr and prob- 
ably others of the apologists. 

Tertullian said that tflie human soul is in its true 
nature Christian — anima naturaliter Christiana, a fine 
piece of insight, well phrased. Some of his proofs or illus- 
trations of his theory are a little quaint; but he was 
right — the more right the deeper one goes. As on the 
mission field today, there were souls who only wanted 
to hear and they would follow Christ — beautiful natures 
and the most winning type of convert. Other souls were 

• Tatian, cf . p. 6. 



204 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

troubled with a conflict of two natures, and were Chris- 
tian with the one and earthly, sensual or devilish with 
the other, capable of acts of high Christian quality, capa- 
ble of horrible relapse and of apostasy, but still within 
the influence of Christ. Human nature is incalculable, 
and the envoy of Christ is confronted by perpetual sur- 
prises, the bitterness of failure when success was assured, 
the deep and grateful joy of triumph snatched out of 
disaster. 

For let us once more look at our records. Paul notes, 
along with their faults, a number of remarkable good 
points about the churches of his converts. They are 
living in a new way, or, like new converts in the heathen 
world today, more and more toward a new way. They 
have great gifts — of real prophecy, of spiritual insight, 
of sheer goodness. Even Corinth, a generation later, is 
recorded to have had an "insatiable passion for kind- 
ness." 10 They are beginning to overcome differences in 
race, education, and tradition — to live together in unity, 
to build on one Foundation, to show signs of having 
"learned Christ," to "shine as lights in the world." In the 
third century and in the fourth there were still martyrs, 
and great thinkers, and real saints in the Noah's Ark 
Church. And so it is with later centuries. The sixteenth 
century, if it gave a Leo X to the world, also gave a 
Luther, a Melanchthon, a Calvin, a Knox — men whom we 
hear criticized now and then without much real knowl- 
edge of what they actually were and what they achieved. 
The eighteenth century had the Wesleys and Law; and 
nearly all, to this day, of our greatest English hymns 
come from the eighteenth century. 

The plain historical fact is tihat we never can tell when 
the Church is going to break out into new life. The won- 
derful thing about it is, as Paul saw, that it is in a real 



10 1 Clement of Rome, ad Cor., 2:2. 



THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 205 

relation with God in Christ; and when that is the case, 
there is always liable to be new light and new truth break- 
ing out of Zion, as John Robinson of Leyden saw. 

Ill 

Let us turn to the cardinal services rendered by tftie 
Christian Church to religion and to sound thinking. 

First of all, then, the Church has (with fluctuations) 
appealed to the higher elements in man. It has always 
assumed in man much larger capacity for thought and 
ideal than its rivals have allowed; it has acted on the 
belief that man is made for the Gospel and the Gospel for 
man, and it has taught mankind to think. Wyclif was a 
rebel against the Church of his day, but he interpreted the 
nobler and more permanent conviction of Christendom, 
when he maintained that preaching was the best work 
that a priest could do, better than praying or ministering 
the sacraments. 11 Paul would have stood with him. "Let 
Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the word" was an 
old Reformation motto, which a mawkish age shortened 
and made commonplace. 

The Church has always stood for Jesus. With what- 
ever degree of directness or indirectness, the historical 
Jesus has been held up to men. The world has been 
familiarized with him — insufficiently, it is true, but his 
name and some fragments of his story are more widely 
known than those of any other man. The early Ohurch 
translated the New Testament into Latin, Syriac, Ethio- 
pic, Armenian, and in the fourth century Ulfilas did it into 
Gothic. 12 The sixteenth century resumed the task and did 



11 A. V. G. Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, p. 252. 

12 See Sir F. G. Kenyon, Textual Criticism of N. T., ch. V. The intri- 
cacy of all questions relating to early versions itself suggests the wide activ- 
ities of early Christians. Cf. also Von Harnack, Mission and Expansion 
of Christianity, II p. 145: "Syriac, which had been checked by the prog- 
ress of Greek, became a civilized and literary tongue, owing to Christian- 
ity." The same has been said in later days of German and Bengali. 



206 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

it into most languages of Europe; the seventeenth did it 
into at least one North American speech 18 and the eigh- 
teenth saw it done into Gaelic for the Highlands of Scot- 
land, as readers of Boswell remember. 1 * The nineteenth 
century was above all the century of Bible translation; 
William Carey alone translated the New Testament into 
eighteen languages of the East. Statistics deaden the 
imagination at least as often as they quicken it. But all 
this work of the study is evidence of the place of Jesus 
in the experience of men, of the conviction that he is rele- 
vant to every man. Bible translation was 'only half the 
task; a printed Bible in a Congo tongue is useless if the 
Congo man cannot read. So he is taught to read; and 
the proclamation of the historical Jesus and the educa- 
tion of mankind have gone on together. And song and 
art have had their share in both sides of the work." 

Further, there has been a steady emphasis on the 
supremacy of Jesus — again the outcome of experience; 
and it has worked as a factor for clear thinking in the 
Church. Whatever the deadening effect of tradition and 
convention, it makes for the development of freedom 
when the stress falls steadily on the clearest of all think- 
ers who have dealt with God. The very wrangling about 
creeds, lamented by a certain type of Christian not of 
the profoundest, has been itself a necessary stage of 
growth and a powerful contribution. If at times theory 
about Jesus has bulked larger in some minds than Jesus 
himself, still the whole movement of interpretation, the 
rise of Christology, has meant thought, and it has directed 
thought to Jesus, and in both ways it has helped mankind. 
Indeed Christianity involved it and could not have con- 
tinued without it. 



"John Eliot's translation of the New Testament into "the Indian 
language" (Massachusetts), published 1661, followed by the Bible in 1663. 
"Boswell (ed. Birkbeck Hill) 2:27 ff. 
"More on this in Chapters XIII and XIV. 



THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 207 

In the next place the Church has stood for the love 
of God. How mankind has always felt its way toward one 
personal God, we have seen. Jesus carried this further, 
and by his teaching of the love of God, by the incarna- 
tion of it in his whole personality, he carried it flamingly 
in the general heart of man. Through a series of cata- 
clysms and earthquakes that have shaken society to its 
foundations and made havoc of slighter faiths, the convic- 
tion of the love of God has persisted in the Church and 
still persists. It has never been obscure how hard it is 
to reconcile experience with the love of God; the Church 
has not had an easy task in maintaining its faith in God, 
but historically Jesus has been the ground of belief, 
the guarantee of the Unseen. 

Once more, and still in the spirit of Jesus, the Church 
has stood for the redemption of the world, for the faith 
that God plays fair with man. It has believed that in 
the long run all the world comes to the judgment seat of 
Christ. In this faith, though with long periods of dead- 
ness, the Church has made it its business to share Christ 
with every man. The vision of the Apocalypse was never 
lost ; with all its odd features, tJhe Church with some hesi- 
tation canonized the book, and stuck to it. 19 A conviction 
of the goodness of God, of the redemption of the whole 
race, is a dynamic thing. It brings to a head the feel- 
ing that righteousness must mark the dealings of God 
with man, and gives it a joy and a certainty which have 
made the Christian faith a different thing from all the 
cults and systems of the world. 

The Church has always stood for the significance of 
the individual ; it could not well do otherwise when Christ 
died for him. Not to repeat what has already been said, 
and is to be said in the chapters that follow, but to sum 
up : the Church has constantly supplied the leaders in all 



16 See Moffatt, Literature of N.T., p. 499. 



208 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

movements for freedom and the betterment of life — the 
leaders, the ideals, and the impulse. If at times it has 
also contained the protagonists of reaction and social 
paralysis, they have drawn their principles and ideas 
from another source than Jesus, as the comparison of his 
historical record shows at once. At the worst, there has 
always been in the Church an instinct to insist on the 
highest standards of morality ; at times with a dead sense 
of these being laws imposed from without, the will of 
an arbitrary Ruler; more profoundly, with the realiza- 
tion that the ethics of Jesus are the interpretation of 
fundamental human nature and of the purposes of the 
redeeming and loving God. It is true that the Church in 
both these matters has at times wavered and compro- 
mised, but on the reality of man's spiritual being it has 
never knowingly compromised ; it has stood for the truth 
of the forgiveness of sins ; it has never lowered the flag 
on the issue of immortality. 

In short, with all its failures, confusions, and omis- 
sions, it has been the Church of Christ; and one proof 
of it is that the Church has achieved new forms from 
time to time, at incalculable cost, and been glad to do so, 
for the sake of making clearer the mind of its Master. 
Jesus was right in his comparison of the Kingdom of 
God with leaven. The life within has never left the 
Church in what it might call peace and he would call 
death; there have been disturbance, upheaval, division; 
church history is not pretty reading; the leaven keeps 
working. There has been a terrific dead weight of dough 
for it to quicken ; but a little fresh warmth from the sun- 
shine of God in t(he face of Christ, and the whole mass 
heaves together with the pulse of life; the great ideas 
revive and Jesus triumphs. 



THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 209 

IV 

In a splendid passage, the writer to the Hebrews 
(11:22 f.) describes the city of the living God, the 
heavenly Jerusalem, the national assembly (ecclesia) 
and festival (panegyris) of the first-born, registered citi- 
zens in heaven, and the spirits of just men made perfect. 
Let us put it into prose. 

Witfh the generations larger and larger masses of peo- 
ple have been trained in the ideas of Jesus. Boys and 
girls have been taught to love him; and in spite of the 
modern inadequacy of the Sunday school, it represents 
a high ideal and a fairly solid achievement. Godly men 
and women have married and had children, who by Chris- 
tian training have grown to be the salt of the earth, as 
Jesus foretold — workers, heroes, martyrs, covenanters, 
scholars, teachers, missionaries — practical saints of 
every kind of spiritual and intellectual power, who have 
made and are making the world over again. The roll of 
the Church is far more wonderful and interesting than 
that roll of Israel, which the writer to the Hebrews un- 
folds ; the range is wider, the problems severer, the char- 
acters more various, more gracious, more spiritual; and 
Jesus predicted this too — the least in the Kingdom are 
ahead of the greatest of the prophets. 

Think -of the races conquered or civilized by tine 
Church — Greece and Rome to begin; think of the salva- 
tion of Europe when our own kindred, still glorious sav- 
ages, swept down on the decaying empire; think of the 
training of Scotland, the planting of Plymouth, the shap- 
ing of New England ; think of Madagascar and the Pacific 
islands, and savage man made Christian in a prepara- 
tory way; think of a century's upheaval in Indian reli- 
gion and Indian ideals of society; think of the martyrs 
in China in 1900 — has the Church been, let us say, on 



210 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

the whole and with all deductions to be properly made, a 
power in the world? and for good? Then add all it has 
done in art and song, from "Hail gladdening light" 
(<£w? iKapov) on to Dante and Milton and beyond. Has it 
not come reasonably near Paul's conception of a "glorious 
church" (Eph. 5:27)? 

If the old Greek poet, Simonides, was right in say- 
ing that "the city teaches the man," is it not possible 
that a society like this can teach the man too? A great 
world-wide society of men and women, a society of friend- 
ship, 17 conscious of the redeeming love of God, inspired 
by the same passion for one Lord, with every variety of 
character and of experience and one experimental knowl- 
edge at the heart of all — has it not a value in suggesting 
to us facts omitted in our survey, ideas imperfectly 
weighed, ideals unattempted, a faith in God and man 
which the world has always struggled for and only 
achieved in Jesus? All the real criticisms made against 
the Church touch it where it has in some degree left the 
line of Jesus; they are reminders, very salutary, that 
"the servant is not above his lord" (John 13 :16). Every- 
one who does nothing to meet these criticisms, to help 
the Church to swing right again, is in effect turning his 
back on history and on Christ. But our theme is Jesus 
in the experience of men ; and I close the chapter with the 
submission that the experience of the Church, in her 
triumphs and her failures alike, points to the reality and 
the permanent significance of Jesus. 



17 Ut sese invicem diligunt, quoted by Tertullian, is just as true as odium 
theologicum. 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 

One of tine outstanding features of social progress 
among mankind has been the progressive development of 
the individual. More and more he has concentrated 
attention on himself, and while it has not always been 
pure gain to society, none the less the gain far outweighs 
the loss. In the region of politics the Greek first discov- 
ered the individual. The Funeral Speech of Pericles, as 
recorded by Thucydides, and the arguments of Callicles in 
Plato's Gorgias, show the good and the bad side of the 
movement. Callicles will hear nothing of law or morality 
being founded in nature ; the individual is the real thing, 
and nature means 

"That they should take who have the power 
And he should keep who can." 

Pericles' ideal is nobler. The individual shall be his 
utmost, shall be developed in every capacity and apti- 
tude, shall enjoy all the liberty needed to this end, that, 
when he has carried nature's gifts to him to their high- 
est stage, when he has become rich in imagination, 
insight, and character, he may consecrate all he is to the 
city he loves. The ideal is one which Jesus himself might 
have put forward, with two important modifications. 
Pericles does not reckon god or gods as a factor, hardly 
as an incident, in the story ; the teaching of Jesus makes 
God central, the center implied in every radius and in 
every smallest or largest arc of the circumference. With 

211 



212 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

this change, would go another; for the city of Athens he 
would put something larger. " 'Dear City of Cecrops!' 
said he of old," so Marcus Aurelius wrote in his diary 
(4:23), "and wilt not thou say, 'Dear City of God'?" 
Jesus would have said it, indeed he did say it in his own 
vocabulary ; and when he speaks of the Kingdom of God, 
it is with the fullest emphasis on the Founder and Maker 
of his ideal city or kingdom. "City," the writer to the 
Hebrews calls it, a man steeped in Greek ways of thought ; 
"Kingdom" was the Hebrew word of Jesus. 

It was the boast of Athenians that Athens was the 
education of Greece. 1 Greece was as truly for a thou- 
sand years before Christ, and for some hundreds of years 
after, the education of the world, and in some degree it 
is so still. The great lesson was what Pericles set forth — 
that more might be made of man in every way, thinker, 
citizen, parent, poet, artist; and the Greek showed how 
it might be done. The barbarian and the Greek differed 
above all in this, that life with the Greek was better 
thought out, better understood, and therefors better 
used. About A.D. 178, Celsus, in his attack on Christian- 
ity, allowed that barbarians — people who were not Greeks, 
such as the Egyptians and the Persians, and in a good 
temper he might possibly have added the Hebrews — were 
able to discover religious truths (dogmata is his word), 
but "to judge them, to establish them, to develop for 
moral growth what the barbarians have discovered — 
that is a task for which the Greeks are fitter." 2 It was 
very much the idea of Greek Christian thinkers. The 
Greek did make more of life and more of man than any 
people of antiquity — humanized man, in fact. And if 
we say that Jesus carried the process further, it is well 
first to see, in outline at least, what the Greeks had done 
before him. 



'Thucydides, II, 41, 1. 8 Ap. Origen, c. Cels., 1:2. 



THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 213 

I 

A thousand years, perhaps, before Christ Homer drew 
some of the finest pictures of chivalry that the world has 
yet had. His imagination sees deep into human charac- 
ter, and the great fundamental human virtues move him. 
He reads the warrior's mind and shows us the hero. 
"Friend of my soul!" says Sarpedon, "were it that, once 
we two were escaped from this war, we should live for 
ever, ageless and immortal, neither would I fight in the 
forefront, nor send thee into the battle that gives glory 
to men. But now fates of death stand over us, ten thou- 
sand of them, that mortal man may not flee nor escape; 
therefore let us go ; either to another we shall give renown 
or he to us." 3 When Andromache begs Hector to stay, 
not to go to the battle and leave their baby boy an orphan, 
"All this," he cries, "is a care to me ; but I have a respect 
unto the Trojans and to the long-robed Trojan women." 4 

aiSeo/uu Tpaias /cat Tpa>a8as eA/cccrtTrcTrXot;?. 

That is Greek courage, courage with the eyes open, the 
risks well seen and taken; and there is another virtue 
there, aidos, self-respect blended with the thought of 
others. Aidos carries with it regard for suppliant and 
stranger, for the helpless, for the fallen foe — "Not holy 
is it to boast over men slain"; it is the sense that there 
is a god, and the greatest of all gods, who looks after the 
stranger within the gates, the herald from the enemy, 
the helpless. It does not always prevail; the Homeric 
hero is capable of horrible ruthlessness — "Heaven send 
not one of the Trojans escape sheer doom and our hands 
— no, not the lad whom his mother carries in her womb !" 3 
But Achilles lets the aged Priam ransom his son's body; 



•Iliad, XII, 322. 
* Iliad, VI, 441. 
6 Iliad, VI, 57. 



214 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

the scene is one no reader can forget. Athene enjoys the 
lies and cunning of Odysseus ; but Achilles cries from his 
heart: "Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is he who 
hideth one thing in his heart, and speaketh another." 9 
The simple great natural virtues are all in Homer. 

A later day saw the rise of the intellectual virtues — of 
the instinct to know, to inquire, to understand, and to 
judge — of the courage that will face new ideas and new 
ignorance, that will move away from ancient moorings 
and explore strange seas of thought — of the feeling that 
thought is not luxury or amusement, but duty, man's 
supreme task. Here Ionia and Athens led the way. 

Later still in the days after Alexander the gentler vir- 
tues rise. "Mere unmotived kindness," as Mr. Bernard 
Bosanquet points out, becomes a spring of action; there 
is a new feeling for children and women, for slaves; a 
new sense for beauty in flower and tree and murmuring 
sound. 7 Stress is laid by the Stoics on the intrinsic value 
of goodness, the importance of will, the inwardness of 
true virtue, the examination of conscience, the control 
of impulse, the cultivation of God's outlook. 

Socrates used to say he was a "citizen of the universe 
(ko<t[jlios)." After Alexander patriotism and parochialism 
ran into one another; patriotism had no other meaning. 
The world's old divisions were gone; the new kingdoms 
were personal domains with no stable frontiers. Race 
was more than country, and race itself was of little 
account. Alexander had "married Europe to Asia." In 
one sense the universe was the only body politic left of 
which a man could be a citizen. A subject of Antiochus 
or of Ptolemy — or, later on, of Caesar — he could still 
boast and believe in the city of Zeus, the universe. The 
Stoic was glad to accept this new franchise; he knew no 
longer of foreigners or local laws, "man was a sacred 



* Iliad, IX, 312. 'Theocritus, Idyll, 1:1. 



THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 215 

thing to man," and men and stars were ruled by one law, 
divine, eternal, inevitable, the law of Nature, a law that 
knew no outlaw, foreigner or barbarian, one for man and 
woman, slave and free. The conception powerfully modi- 
fied Roman law in the direction of breadth and humanity. 

The world's progress had been immense, but it still 
had a long way to go. If the Stoic counted "man a sacred 
thing to man," the government did not. The citizenship 
of the universe was amenable to Aristotle's criticism of 
Plato's Republic; relations within it were "rather 
watery." Those who talked most of it were men without 
children, a class notoriously sagacious without under- 
standing; and when one remembers that one of their 
ideals was "emotionlessness" ("the savage and hard 
apathy" Plutarch calls it), it grows clear that a great 
deal of life lay outside the range of the citizen of the uni- 
verse. Indeed his teachers told him, as a practical meas- 
ure, to keep within himself, to be limited to "the things in 
thine own power," tecum habita — to condole but not to 
sympathize; to reckon, if he had a child, that it would 
die; to realize that, if he did not love his wife's beauty, 
he would not be thrown into emotion and out of balance 
by her adultery. "Emotionlessness" was bound to work 
out into inhuman insensibility; it was inwardly a selfish 
counsel, a counsel of despair, to steel the heart to keep it 
from breaking, to keep it equal to work. It was, as some 
more human critics felt at the time, in effect an apostasy 
from the universe, unbelief. They preached nature and 
defied nature. The motive was not the highest, and no 
other will avail with mankind in the end. 

But, as Dr. Edward Caird pointed out, 8 the Stoics 
missed the vital fact that man is essentially a develop- 
ing being, "partly is and wholly hopes to be." There 
was not enough experiment about the Stoic; who can 



8 Caird, Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, II, 102. 



216 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

master human psychology, who turns his back on woman 
and is not interested in children? They made great con- 
tributions to psychology, but in whole areas of the soul 
they had no belief. Nor did they believe so much in per- 
sonality as to be able to carry it past the dissolution into 
atoms. For men who reject immortality, who do not 
believe in outcome to their own endeavors to help man- 
kind forward even on earth, Stoicism is the highest phil- 
osophy, and a very high one; but it cuts too many ques- 
tions to do more than contribute to rival creeds. Where 
Stoicism failed, the mystery cults were not likely to 
succeed. 

It is the complaint of many that in the European war 
civilization failed, and many others hold that it had 
already failed in peace. But in the early centuries of our 
era, under the best government that the Mediterranean 
broadly had ever known, and in peace, civilization rested 
normally on atrocities that today are abnormal even in 
war. That it grew gentler under the Empire, is a propo- 
sition hard to maintain in view of the civil wars and reli- 
gious persecutions of the third century a.d. It had reached 
a standstill. In four hundred years the tools show no 
improvement; currency and finance decline; government 
grows more and more bureaucratic, and apart from the 
Christian Church it is difficult to find new ideas anywhere. 

II 

"The advance of the community depends not merely on 
the improvement and elevation of its moral maxims, but 
also on the quickening of moral sensibility. The latter 
work has mostly been effected, when it has been effected 
on a large scale, by teachers of a certain singular personal 
quality." So wrote John Morley in 1874,* and it will 
serve as a text for the next stage of our study. 



■ Compromise, p. 237. 



THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 217 

The rejection of Jesus gives the measure of his age. He 
had, like other leaders of men in the field of intellect and 
feeling, to develop the spiritual and intellectual qualities 
by which he should be understood. Here once more, as 
in the case of the knowledge of God, Jesus abolishes 
nothing real ; he comes "not to destroy but to fulfil" ; and 
the boundless significance of his work lay in uniting all the 
virtues, that the common people and the Stoics between 
them knew, in a new and intimate relation with religion, 
or rather with God, and giving them a new breadth and 
freedom and life. The theory on which men do kindness 
is one thing, the real reason another ; there are people who 
do good by instinct and on impulse and give wrong rea- 
sons for it — a fact to be remembered when we criticize 
Stoic theory; but Jesus gave all virtue a new center and 
a new motive ; act and theory jarred no more ; the human 
spirit had a charter and an inspiration to be what God 
meant it to be. 

The fact that he was a carpenter, a poor man, im- 
pressed men from the beginning. "He took upon him 
the form of slave," wrote Paul (Phil. 2:7). "The Lord 
ate from a cheap bowl," said Clement of Alexandria," "and 
made his disciples lie on the ground, on the grass, and 
he washed their feet with a towel about him, the lowly- 
minded God and Lord of the universe. He did not bring 
a silver footbath from heaven to carry about with him. 
He asked the Samaritan woman to give him to drink in 
a vessel of clay as she drew from the well." Jesus, writes 
Phillips Brooks, "so poor, so radical, so full of the sense 
of everything just as it is in God."" 

A fictitious Chinaman of our day speaks of him as 
"unlettered, untraveled, inexperienced" — a rather aca- 
demic view of things. Unlettered he was not; he read 



"Clem. Alex., Paed., II, 32, 
11 Light of the World, p. 87. 



218 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

the Old Testament in Hebrew, and other books; and he 
spoke Aramaic and Greek. A man with two languages, 
who at least reads a third, is not quite illiterate. But 
inexperienced — what is experience? It depends on a 
man's gift of seeing and feeling. Jesus himself speaks 
of men seeing but not seeing; more than once he notices 
this in men, and with an air of surprise at them. Pales- 
tine was not a backwater; it was on a trade route; and 
if it had been an out-of-the-way place, Burns may suggest 
to us what experience a man of genius may gain in a 
corner of life. Climate and the habits of the day drove 
Jesus outdoors for his education, and it was real. He 
knew what it was to work all day, and, on coming home, 
to have to face the tragedy of the lost coin, the children 
hungry, and the clothes past mending. A man who goes 
through sudden popularity, who carries a threatened life, 
who lives with a cross before his eyes, may be surmised 
to have had experience. 

But it is enough to survey his interests. "Suffer little 
children to come unto me," is a saying hardly to be par- 
alleled in ancient literature. How can he who has to teach 
mankind go "looking for something to heat the water in 
for the baby's bath?" is the question of Epictetus. 12 Like 
Dr. Johnson, Jesus loved young men, whether like Dr. 
Johnson he found them more virtuous than old men, or 
(as we did in the European war) saner. The evangelists 
emphasize how he spoke with women and took kindnesses 
from them. He was not afraid of women, nor ever warned 
his followers to keep away from them. He never felt 
family life to be a mistake or hinted that marriage was 
unclean; and how many religions past and present have 
stood for celibacy, and resented God's invention of sex? 
The traditional Moses seemed to imply that labor was 
God's curse on sin, but no such idea is to be found in the 



^Epictetus, Diatr., 3:22. 



THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 219 

teaching of Jesus. How many of his parables show a 
bright interest in human energy, in the mind set to work, 
in the tasks of men and women ? And not a hint that it is 
all a curse! "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?" he 
asked. Is God's man (in other words) or your taboo of 
more consequence? "Is not a man better than a sheep?" 
(Matt. 12 :12). It is hardly a hundred years since English 
law was with great difficulty persuaded to admit this prop- 
osition, and to leave off hanging a man for stealing a 
sheep. If he had lived today, Jesus might have asked 
still worse questions. 

Jesus had none of the resentment against humanity 
which has at times swept over the finer spirits of our 
race, a mood to be read in Shakespeare himself. With his 
eyes open to human hatefulness, Jesus likes men and 
enjoys them. His quick responsiveness to the emotions 
of others, to the woman's wit, his pleasure in sharing the 
feelings of his friends, his sympathy with "the least of 
these, my brethren," his sensitiveness to the unsaid — all 
these gifts reveal not only character but faith. A genial 
interest in others may be born in a man, and it may 
degenerate in various ways; or it may be interwoven 
with a deeper insight, and become a great belief in man as 
a creation of God, embodying (one may say it) the deepest 
thoughts of God, a great deal of God's own nature. That 
this is the case with Jesus appears from his acute pleasure 
in bird and flower, and his relation of these things to the 
mind of God, and from the assurance he gives to his dis- 
ciples that "ye are of more value than many sparrows." 
By a curious chance an inscription has been found, issued 
by an ancient food control office, fixing the maximum price 
for sparrows, so much for a string of ten, five for a half 
of that, and for a quarter of it two. 13 Jesus quotes the 



18 Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, p. 271. It belongs to the 
reign of Diocletian and gives prices of various foods. Sparrows were 
cheaper than thrushes and starlings. 






220 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

prices and then sets another value, very different, upon 
the birds, by sweeping at once into the presence of God; 
and then, with the picture of God himself, interested and 
delighted in every individual sparrow, with the sparrow 
thus raised to the highest point it has ever reached, he 
reminds men how much more thought God has put into 
them, how much more interesting God finds them, how 
much more lovable. He brings out the significance of 
man by bringing him into relation with God, and it is 
exactly the opposite result he draws from that of civil 
servants and statisticians. 

To the Inland Revenue Office a man has a certain tax- 
paying value, apart from which he seems negligible. To 
the census official a man is (let us say) one-forty-millionth 
of the United Kingdom. By similar calculation the sta- 
tistician will bring out that to God a man's significance is 



1,500,000,000 



of mankind ; and when he has multiplied the denominator 
by the (possible) millions of generations of eternity and 
again by the number possibly as large of conceivable other 
words, he makes the individual an incalculably trivial 
item in God's universe. Jesus alters all that by bringing 
in the Fatherhood of God. It would probably be impos- 
sible for even the stupidest civil servant to comfort a 
father in the loss of his son by pointing out that he has 
lost only .25 of his family, or even less, .125. The boy is 
not a fraction but an integer — "John" is a personality not 
a decimal. Jesus blots out the humiliating denominator 
and leaves the numerator, and by insisting that each man 
as a personality is an integer for God, gives a new value 
to all human life. 



THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 221 

III 

It ! has been complained that Jesus, with the horrors of 
slavery under his eyes, said not a word about it. Of how 
little use a discussion of the false economics of slavery 
would have been in that generation, may be guessed from 
the scant attention paid by our own to the warnings given 
us of the disastrous effects of war upon the world's 
economics. We were told; but we all knew better, and 
were wrong. In the nineteenth century the merchants 
of Liverpool gave a gold casket to the Prince Regent for 
his endeavors to maintain against Wilberforce and Clark- 
son and other enthusiasts that essential foundation of 
England's commercial prosperity, the slave trade. The 
experts were on one side, and on the other the "philan- 
thropists" and "agitators" ; and "most of what is decently 
good in our curious world," says Lord Morley, "has been 
done by these two much-abused sets of folk." 1 * And what 
set them to disturb England about mere Negroes? His- 
torically, it was the assertion by Jesus of the value of the 
individual Negro to God — not so much by word spoken, 
as by the quieter and more impressive witness of the 
cross. Jesus, unable to convince men in any other way, 
died for the Negro. / 

Paul, dealing with the religious ideas, valid enough, of 
some of his friends, brings in a final consideration : "De- 
stroy not him with thy meat for whom Christ died" 
(Rom. 14:15). The very phrase chimes through the 
Christian centuries. When the new Roman governor of 
Cyenaica about a.d. 410 began to oppress the people, the 
brilliant and charming Synesius wrote to him in a tone 
that he could not mistake; the governor was treating 
human beings as if they were cheap, but "man is a thing 
of price, for Christ died for him." The scholar Muretus 



14 Recollections, II, p. 172. 



222 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

in 1554 said the same to the physicians who proposed to 
try upon him an experiment, in anima vili: "Vilem (mi- 
mam appellas," came a voice from the bed, "pro qua 
Christus non dedignatus est moriV Kett in rebellion in 
Norfolk said it to the court's emissary: "Call not them 
villeins for whom Christ died." It has been a charter of 
the oppressed through the ages. The mind of Jesus, 
exhibited by his death, stands still in marked contrast 
with our modern materialistic way of making much of 
things and property and little of men. When Mr. Bernard 
Shaw flippantly talked of compensating sweated labor 
with cheap forecasts of heaven, whatever class of people 
he meant to hit, he did not touch the Jesus of Nazareth 
and of Calvary. He at least never spoke in that vein; 
and, if his followers had, the great world might have 
credited them with more sense and less enthusiasm. 

The great illustrative fact of heathenism is its cheapen- 
ing of human life. The last centuries of Indian history 
before British rule are a commentary on this; 15 the doc- 
trine of Karma, with its teaching of 8,000,000 rebirths, 
so said an Indian official of a Maharaja to me, is one cause 
for the carelessness about individual life. And India is 
not a land of savages, nor was the Roman Empire. Na- 
tions are remade less by treaties and Acts of Parliament 
and rearrangements of outward things than by deep 
regenerations of spirit and desire. Tyndale, the trans- 
lator of our New Testament in 1526, said in what seems a 
very modern tone that, if the King of England did amiss, 
it lay in the right of the meanest to tell him he did naught. 
England read and revised and re-read his New Testa- 
ment for a century, and told a king of England that he 
did naught — told him in a way intelligible to himself and 
to posterity. No wonder the Marquis Wellesley in 1808 



15 On this point it is better to take the evidence of contemporary and 
non-missionary documents than the political propaganda of a certain party 
today. 



THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 223 

deprecated the circulation of the Bible in Bengali as dan- 
gerous "without the safeguard of a commentary" — an 
interesting explanation, one notes, of the object of a com- 
mentary. The Marquis was right; the Bible has made 
great upheavals in India 18 as it did in the Roman world 
and elsewhere. Factory Acts in England began with the 
evangelical Lord Shaftesbury, and have a parallel in that 
clause in the Code of Justinian which exempts a mima, 
who becomes Christian, from being dragged back to the 
theater and the life of shame. 

An interesting conversation, illuminative for our pres- 
ent purpose, is to be found in the Life of Henry George 
(p. 438). Henry George was talking with Cardinal Man- 
ning of their common interests. "I loved the people," 
he said, "and that love brought me to Christ as their best 
friend and teacher." "And I loved Christ," said Man- 
ning, "and so learned to love the people for whom he 
died." 

But, as Dr. Johnson wrote in Goldsmith's Traveller, 

"How small of all that human hearts endure 

That part which kings or laws can cause or cure!" 

Life is not made by the constitution under which we live, 
nor by the laws that should control us. It depends far 
more on what the Greek calls "the unwritten laws the 
breaking of which brings admitted shame." The caustic 
English sarcasm, "worse than wicked — vulgar," hits off 
what Thucydides meant. How little manners matter and 
how much ! George Whitefield, as Dr. Dale once pointed 
out, never dreamed of preaching about courtesy and good 
manners, but Jesus did preach about them— did it 
explicitly and much more implicitly. The "high-minded 
man," according to Aristotle," "justly despises" others 



19 See J. N. Farquhar's fascinating book, Modern Religious Movements 
in India. 

17 Nicomachean Ethics, IV, 8, p. 1124b. 



224 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

and is "ashamed of receiving: a benefit." Jesus let women 
minister to him of their substance, and accepted it as nat- 
ural and friendly that his disciples should row while he 
slept, but there is in every syllable of his teaching, in 
every movement of his mind, that recognition of God's 
interest in the meanest of men, which is the antithesis of 
contempt. The definition of a gentleman as one who 
never puts his feelings before the rights of others or his 
rights before their feelings, is quite in his vein. The 
gravamen of rudeness is its suggestion that the other 
man does not matter, and is uninteresting. Jesus made 
every man interesting by bringing out that God is inter- 
ested in him. He himself found something attractive or 
of importance in every man ; he had a genius for appre- 
ciation and he conveyed it to those who caught his mind. 
If eminent Christians have sometimes lacked it, it has, 
perhaps, been because they were too eminent to be quite 
Christian. Jesus, however, said plainly : "Let the greater 
among you be as the younger," and added, in a sentence 
as charming and playful as it was true: "I am among 
you as the serving man" (6 <Wovwv) (Luke 22 :26, 27) . 
Paul, in the same spirit, will have Christians "forbear one 
another" and "speak truth in love" (Eph. 4:2, 15) ; but 
even he, one feels, fell short of the charm that appears 
in Jesus' dealings with men and women. Children went 
to him, mothers showed him their babies, all sorts of 
people brought him all sorts of troubles and questions; 
and he was a man who could be interrupted without explo- 
sion. He has the secret of charm and he can communicate 
it, though how is another question, but it is to those who 
believe in him through and through. Any defect of belief 
in Jesus shows itself somewhere in unbelief in God or 
disbelief in man. The headmaster of one of our great 
schools recently wrote, in an essay on education, that "it 
is hard to take even the shortest railway journey and keep 



THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 225 

true to the Sermon on the Mount." Perhaps Jesus would 
not have pushed people off a tram-platform, which would 
seem to indicate that his standards of the relative import- 
ance of things were different in some way from ours, and 
that our life is not yet humanized beyond his ideal. 

Clement of Alexandria tells us of vain persons who 
held up the example of Jesus as a reason for rejecting 
marriage, which "they call mere prostitution and a prac- 
tice introduced by the devil." 18 This was not mere rhetoric. 
To primitive thought (and there is still much of it in the 
world) there was something supernatural in conception, 
something demoniacal ; some religions defied it and made 
a sacred ritual of the process of reproduction; some 
repudiated it as polluting. Clement takes another view 
of Nature, much more like that of Jesus. Nature made 
us to marry, and "the childless man falls short of the per- 
fection of Nature." 19 Men must marry for their country's 
sake and for the completeness of the universe f the mar- 
ried man exhibits "a certain distant image of the true 
Providence." 21 The heathen may practice abortion and 
expose their children and keep parrots instead, but the 
begetting and bringing up of children is a part of the 
■Christian married life. 22 "Who are the two or three 
gathering in the name of Christ, among whom the Lord 
is in the midst? Does he not mean man, wife, and child 
by the three, seeing woman is made to match man by 
God?" 23 Tertullian said there would be something shame- 
less about God calling us sons, if he forbade us to have 
sons by taking marriage from us. 2 * This group of pas- 
sages from two great Christian thinkers about the year 
a.d. 200 is significant enough, more still when we find 

18 Stromateis, 3:49. 
"Strom., 2:139, 5. 
29 Strom., 2:140, 1. 
31 Strom., 7:70, end. 
23 Paidagogos, 2:83, 1. 
28 Strom., 3:68,1. 
2 *Adv. Marcion, 4:17. 



226 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

Paul allowing marriage "because of harlotries" (II Cor. 
7:1, 2). When one realizes how deeply the ideal of celi- 
bacy had tainted the spiritual atmosphere, this concep- 
tion of Christian married life grows more surprising, but 
it represents the real teaching of Jesus. 

When men challenged Jesus upon the divorce question, 
and quoted Moses against him, he threw over Moses. 
Moses had an eye on his constituency and compromised 
(Mark 10:5). The real issue was the design of God in 
making and mating the sexes; did God mean temporary 
unions, shorter or longer? Today we hesitate perhaps 
in referring matters so abruptly to God, and try the inter- 
mediate court of Nature; and Jesus meets us there quite 
readily, he has no suspicion of Nature and the facts of the 
case are all he wants. As usual, he does not much argue 
the matter. He goes to the home for endless illustrations 
of spiritual life and he never (like Paul) draws a parable 
from the breakdown of marriage (Rom. 7 :2) . How much 
home meant to him appears in his tone from time to time 
— "the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head" — in 
the welcome he gives to children, in his tenderness for 
widows and mothers. It is not idly that the friendliest 
of modern poets slips into speaking of 

"Little children saying grace 

In every Christian kind of place." 

It is just where one would expect them, and exactly what 
they would be doing. 

In the Middle Ages — that curious "age of faith" when 
men believed furiously in Christ, fought crusades for him 
and burned heretics for him, but accepted neither his 
teaching nor his spirit as very real or serious — the 
Church swung altogether over to celibacy; whatever else 
they did, priests might not marry. "I praise marriage," 
said Jerome, "I praise wedlock, but because they bear 



THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 227 

me virgins; I gather from the thorn the rose. 28 Luther 
brought his generation abruptly back to the ideas of 
Jesus, when he shocked it by marrying the ex-nun Kath- 
arine Bora. 29 The modern biologist, with his mind upon 
Nature and society, and less interested in church tradi- 
tion, stands here with Jesus and Luther. "It was one of 
the greatest social services of the Reformation that it 
broke with the ascetic ideal so far as marriage was con- 
cerned, and ranked the married life higher than the un- 
married. . . . The sterility of monks and nuns and 
priests for so many centuries turned the laws of heredity 
against the moral progress of the race." 27 But the home 
matters still more than the stock, and children notori- 
ously grow up better in Christian homes than in Platonic 
barracks or convent orphanages — and even in quite ordi- 
nary homes, as French statesmen have found. What 
England owes to the children of ministers and clergy and 
even deacons, may be read in part in the Dictionary of 
National Biography, a work without much theological 
bias. 

The school owes something to the Christian Church. 
By the second century daily reading of the Bible was 
inculcated, for the Church quickly realized that the Chris- 
tian was called to be better educated and more intellectu- 
ally alert than the heathen — to be more "human." By 1609 
common education was a municipal charge in Holland, 
for the "Protestants of the Netherlands saw the immense 
importance of education to their cause, based as it was on 
the study of the Scriptures, and the general education of 
the people and the wide diffusion of printed books, espe- 
pecially the Bible, had much to do with the reality of the 
Dutch Reformation, and with its popular character." 28 



2B Jerome, Ep., 22:20. 

29 See further Ch. XIV, p. 244. 

27 W. Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, 167, 174. 

38 Winnifred Cockshott, The Pilgrim Fathers, p. 114. 



228 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

The Pilgrim Fathers, who gave American life its spirit, 
took these Dutch ideas with them to New England; and 
school and college were among the first concerns of the 
Puritans there, as they are still in America. England is 
the one Protestant country that has despised education. 
John Knox put things on another footing in Scotland a 
generation before 1609. It is interesting to find that 
today on the Congo at least one great missionary society 
will not accept converts into the Church till they can 
read; the New Testament, i.e., the historical Jesus, is 
the Negro's best safeguard against superstition, his 
surest hope of development. And the heathen see what 
it means; "The God of the Catholics," the saying goes 
at Yakusu, "has no books." How many colleges, before 
and after Harvard, founded in 1636 by men "dreading to 
leave an illiterate ministry to the churches," does man- 
kind owe to Christian emphasis on the development of 
the mind? 

The date of The Teaching of the Apostles has been dis- 
puted. Discovered, and printed in 1881, it came as a 
shock to those who were not prepared for such startling 
simplicity in the early Church, and some prefer to see 
in it a fancy sketch of some fourth century heretic. 
Sounder opinion confirms an earlier date; perhaps about 
A.D. 100 would serve. Here, then, is a short chapter from 
this remarkable book. "Everyone that cometh in the 
name of the Lord, let him be received ; and then when you 
have tested him, you shall know, for you will have sense, 
right and left. If he that cometh be on a journey, help 
him as much as you can. But he shall not abide with 
you more than two or three days, if it be necessary. But 
if he will settle with you, if he is a craftsman, let him 
work and eat. If he has not a craft, according to your 
sense take measures that he shall not live among us idle, 
a Christian. If he will not do this, he is a trafficker in 



THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 229 

Christ. Beware of such." The early Church has to trans- 
late Jesus' word, "Give to him that asketh of thee"; and 
realizes that the best gift a man can have given him is a 
trade and a chance to work at it. "You will have sense." 
Probably the modern could not better the suggestion to 
the little community. 

Family life, education, trade-teaching — the Church 
began as it has gone on with the ideal of helping men. 
A "passion for doing good" marked the Corinthian 
Church, as we have seen; and there are various ways of 
doing good. To feed the hungry, is one; to put him in 
the way of feeding others, is a still better. The Christian 
was in the world to carry out the ideas of God in their 
full compass. Many he took from the common store of 
his times, some he discovered for himself; he would 
"have sense." He made mistakes, of course; but his 
love of Jesus was a steady corrective, for it kept him in 
touch with an emancipating spirit, and gave him an in- 
spiration which has never died. 

Stoic cosmopolitanism was eclipsed by Christian. "If 
then God," says Peter (Acts 11 :17), "gave them the same 
gift, who was I to be able to prevent God?" and he jus- 
tifies the universalism of the Church from its identity of 
experience. Jesus was interpreted aright; his thought 
of God as center, as God and Father of all, included all 
mankind. 2 * The language of the cross was intelligible to 
all men; it had the same revelation, the same charm for 
all. By the end of the first century the hymns of the 
Apocalypse include all nations and races arid languages 
joining in one song, a new song. That song has not 
grown old. In Christ there is neither barbarian, Scythian, 



*• Mr. Montefiore, in Pharisaism and St. Paul, p. 56, in describing Hab- 
binic Judaism, has a most remarkable sentence: "This indifference, dis- 
like, contempt, particularism — this ready and not unwilling consignment of 
the non-believer and the non-Jew to perdition and gloom — was quite con- 
sistent with the most passionate religious faith and with the most exqui- 
site and delicate charity." 



230 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

Jew, nor Greek, as Paul said. We should put other race- 
names, and it would be equally true. What is more, men 
of every race know in their hearts that Jesus Christ is a 
closer bond of union than any other. Every Christian 
nation by now recognizes that the whole world has to be 
won for Christ; missions are in the program of every 
church; and in Christ is the hope of the world. Chris- 
tian experience turns to prophecy; what he has done, he 
will do "according to the working whereby he is able even 
to subdue all things unto himself" (Phil. 3:21). 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE RECONCILIATION OF FREEDOM AND 
RELIGION 

When St. Paul tells us that "Where the spirit of the 
Lord is, there is liberty (II Cor. 3:17), he says what is 
against traditional etymology. Etymology may tell us 
what a word originally meant, and sometimes it still 
means the same; but more often a word makes its own 
meaning for itself out of the company which it keeps, 
and forgets all about its origin. The older etymologists, 
however, connected the word "religion" with the verb 
that meant to bind, not to loose. Indeed a great anthro- 
pologist of today, the French Jew, Salomon Reinach, has 
denned religion as "a collection of scruples which impede 
the free exercise of our faculties." That is a charmingly 
simple definition; but it is, perhaps, rather what he 
would wish us to think of religion, than anything else. 
We must remember that a definition may be a war cry 
or a slander, and that we have to look at the man who 
makes it and at his purpose as well as at the definition 
itself. Other thinkers take a profounder view of religion. 
"Man," writes Professor Gilbert Murray, "is imprisoned 
in the external present; and what we call a man's reli- 
gion is, to a great extent, the thing that offers him a 
secret and permanent means of escape from that prison, a 
breaking of the prison walls which leaves him standing, 
of course, still in the present, but in a present so enlarged 
and enfranchised that it becomes not a prison, but a free 
world." Similarly, Professor Cairns writes : "Religion 

231 



232 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

is, fundamentally, on the human side, man's protest and 
appeal to the Supreme against the sorrows, indignities, 
and sins of this present world. It is the endeavor of 
man, through that appeal, to unite himself with the life 
of that unseen and ruling world, and so to win the power 
from it to dominate and transmute the life of time." 
Historically, this is the truer view. Primitive religion, 
when it has outlived its time, grows to be very like magic 
and is a limitation upon man's mind and action; but in 
every really living community thought and religion have 
always interacted on each other. How could it be other- 
wise? In essence the religious life is the deepest life of 
all ; for the most fundamental thing in man is his relation 
of himself and of all the world to God, so that thought 
will be at the very heart of religion. 

Yet those who say that religion and thought are antag- 
onistic, and point to the Christian Church and to other 
religions for proof of what they say, have a certain case. 
For many men and women realize the need of religion, as 
they call it, but want it merely as an anodyne against the 
troubles of life, or as a protection against God. They 
want "salvation," regarding it as something definite and 
precise, a final settlement with God, a discharge of obli- 
gations, rather than as renewal of relations with an old 
friend. Many others mean to base their lives on reli- 
gion, but resent the labor of thought ; they prefer things 
fixed and done with, settled notions, and laws laid down 
and needing only to be carried out; they do not count 
thought a duty or a necessity. Men ask for a simple 
Gospel, "the old, old story," forgetful that the heart of 
"the old, old story" is only reached when it is daily a new 
surprise, that nothing that is real remains simple very 
long. Others lean to ritual on aesthetic grounds or from 
sentiment, and a great many through sheer force of habit; 
and some of them, if only there is enough symbol, are not 



FREEDOM AND RELIGION 233 

very anxious as to what the symbol means — a danger that 
seems inseparable from symbolism. But, above all, there 
is a class for whom truth is a static thing, something of 
which they feel "you know what it is and there it is," as 
if "the faith once delivered unto the saints" (Jude 3) 
were a set of propositions simple and definite, and life- 
less as the multiplication table — as if "faith" were not 
rather an instinct to explore God, to know the heights 
and depths of Christ, to track out the great spiritual pur- 
pose behind all existence. 

There is always disaster where thought and religion are 
regarded as antagonistic. It has often happened in the 
history of men and nations, that the religious have stood 
on one side and the speculative on the other, with a good 
deal of mutual contempt, sometimes with hatred. In Eng- 
land the mood is perhaps less one of hatred than of quiet 
contempt; "the Church," someone has said, "is thought 
of as feminine ; the world is not as much afraid of it as of 
Ramsay Macdonald." Society depends on thought and 
movement; if it is not progressive, it declines. The 
Roman Empire fell because it became an ideal bureau- 
cracy; men gave up the hope of new ideas, and even the 
very notion that they were desirable; they left their 
thinking to be done by civil servants. Freedom is the 
necessary condition of reaching higher stages of life and 
thought ; and if the Church manage to get the reputation 
for missing this conception, men turn against it. It is 
not in the Christian Church alone, but in other religious 
communities, even in a greater degree, that men have 
come to believe that, with too close an investigation into 
religion and its basis, all confidence in it goes ; that it is 
safe, so long as one does not touch it and does not examine 
it, but that to ask questions is dangerous to faith. The 
prevalence, real or supposed, of this fear among Christian 
teachers has provoked the caustic definition of faith as 



234 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

"believing what you know to be untrue." We deserve 
that taunt when we are shy of thought. That mood is 
not faith; it is doubt. In some of the most religious 
spirits of antiquity, as of today, and in every religion, we 
find that inherent scepticism; and the honest, the candid, 
and the good say: "If that is religion, let us have none 
of it." We can have too much of the past, too much even 
of our inheritance. "If our duty to the Past is to re- 
member, our second duty is to forget." 1 We need to 
forget; we need to have new experience; we have to be 
dissatisfied with our range in truth; we have to explore 
beyond it. All men who know and love truth, know that ; 
and what can they think of a Christian Church, where 
that spirit is suspect? 

I 

When we ask the mind of Jesus upon the question, he 
is, as always, abundantly clear. The sentence, attributed 
in the Fourth Gospel (8 :32) to Jesus, "The truth shall 
set you free," is like other sayings in that book, rather 
an extraordinarily vivid summary of the whole teaching 
and spirit of Jesus than an actual quotation. If he did 
not say it — well ! he lived it ; his eyes flashed : "The truth 
shall make you free." We attribute to Jesus, very un- 
imaginatively, an omniscience, which takes much of the 
meaning out of his whole story. Omniscience may be an 
inert thing; the most omniscient people we meet have 
often very little mind at all. What we find in the histori- 
cal Jesus is a much greater thing than omniscience ; it is 
that freedom of mind, that activity of intellect, which we 
associate with all great characters who launch into the 
world ideas that emancipate. Jesus has an infinite capac- 
ity for interest in things and people, in the human mind 
and its relations to God. Interest was with him a habit ; 



1 J. H. Moulton, The Treasure of the Magi. 



FREEDOM AND RELIGION 235 

it is clear that he had the gift of instinctive observation, 
which Wordsworth describes. He recognized the neces- 
sity of inquiry, which Nature — or, he would have said, 
God — implants in men. He understood the men who ask, 
who seek, who knock, and he promised that there will be 
answers to questions and opening of doors. In an extra- 
ordinary phrase, which seems to rest on other optical 
theories than ours, he pictured a man's "whole body full 
of light." Jesus, who thought in pictures and spoke in 
pictures, must have meant more by this than we care- 
lessly assume as we read it ; he must have had some idea 
in his mind. "As when the lamp with its flash lightens 
thee" are his words (Luke 11 :36) ; and one thinks today 
of the "torches" we used in the dark nights of the war; 
does he mean a body like some kind of incarnated and per- 
sonal X-ray, which might light everything up, till the 
secrets of things stood out revealed — a personality that 
illuminated everything? 2 More plainly, he says: "There 
is nothing hid that shall not be known" (Luke 8:17). 
"Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the King- 
dom of God" (Luke 8:10) — a thought in vivid antithesis 
to the cults of mystery and sacrament, which traded in 
the unknowable and extolled trance above reason. He 
promises that we are to see our way at last through all 
the wonders of the whole wide realm of God; and it is 
the promise of a thinker who does not use words without 
feeling their meaning, who understands the appeal of 
God and his ways. It seems fair in view of such sayings 
to hold that he recognized the progressive character of 
truth; and this is confirmed by his many parables that 
turn on growth, on progress and expansion, on life enlarg- 
ing itself a hundredfold. It is intelligence, after all, 
progressive intelligence that gives freedom, and not the 



2 Cf . John Bailey, Johnson, p. 120: "Johnson never, even in his religion, 
left his open eye or his common sense behind him; and common sense 
told him what a brighter light concealed from St. Francis." 



236 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

acceptance of ignorance, in whatever piety it cloaks itself. 
We must remember his independence, his sincerity of 
mind; we often miss "the immense amount of real hard 
thinking implied in the religious and moral teaching of 
Jesus." 8 He lived in a world when men were beginning 
more and more to look to the past (real or fictitious) for 
guidance in religion. All the cults had sacred books, and 
many hidden books. He read, but he read "as one having 
authority." "It was said to them of old time . . . but 
I say unto you," is not the utterance of one in bondage 
to quotations or traditions (Matt. 5:35). He criticized 
Moses' law — "an eye for an eye" was not right; and he 
criticized Moses himself for compromising on a moral 
question and permitting what was not in God's law 
(Mark 10:5, with Matt. 19:8). When he used scripture, 
it was not as his contemporaries did, still less as Christian 
apologists of a century later did ; he went to the heart of 
it, and took what he found to be true.* He treated reli- 
gious traditions and usages in the same way; taboos 
about food he put aside as irrelevant to a man's real being 
(Mark 7:18). It is shrewdly suggested that, if he had 
said anything in tune with the growing fancy for asceti- 
cism, we should have heard of it. His sayings reflect his 
mind. He has not the flaws of contemporary style in 
speech; he is simple and direct; he uses "the language 
actually employed by men," as if he had read and accepted 
William Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads (the 
edition of 1800). Imagination, playfulness, and intensity 
give life to his words; there is no hint of artifice in 
them; they are all nature and truth. It is a dynamic 
speech that does things, like Luther's words, that were 
called "half-battles." His intolerance of even the half- 
false in speech is shown in his refusal of polite compli- 



8 Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, p. 78. 

* Cf . Loisy, Ev. Syn., 1:569: " U emancipation de Paul, beaucoup plus 
apparente, n'etait pas plus reele." 



FREEDOM AND RELIGION 237 

ments ; he will not have "good Master," and he will limit 
affirmation and denial to yes and no. 

Such speech comes, and can only come, from a mind of 
equal sincerity. He does not use quotations, because he 
goes to facts — "Tell John what things ye hear and see" 
— and to facts which people can verify. Truth is essen- 
tially loyalty to the fact, to the actual, to the intelligible 
in the fact; there is no copyright in it; and while some 
people naively hold that such loyalty narrows range, that 
it binds and limits the mind, the great poets confirm the 
experience of Jesus that it sets free. Above all his genius 
is for the fact with meaning. A man, he suggests, may 
gain skill in weather lore by observation and reflection. 
Facts are not all of equal significance. Knowledge in- 
volves scale and perspective, distinction between mosqui- 
toes and camels, between potherbs and the great cardinal 
virtues of faith and mercy — and intelligence, we may add 
by way of gloss. Truth is not merely an affair of the 
intellect, for it depends, as the intellect does too, on a 
man's whole moral being. Jesus stood for honesty, and 
for thought and intelligence; and so far as we are loyal 
to him, we shall not be in bondage to the second-hand or 
cramped by traditions. 

On the contrary Jesus makes it clear that he came into 
the world to emancipate men — not to make them of one 
mind but of many, to launch divisions of thought. Micah's 
words will be fulfilled; families will be divided. He 
"comes to set fire to the world" (Luke 12:49), as if to 
start the forest fire that changes the whole aspect and 
character of a countryside. What a picture of himself 
he draws creating divisions, unsettling men, driving them 
this way and that, inaugurating all the friction and all 
the stimulus that comes when men of different minds 
handle truth in earnest ! He saw all this, and summed up 
the whole story in the parable of the leaven — disturb- 



238 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

ance, disorders, bubbles, and broken bubbles. Some people 
think the Church's history is a succession of broken bub- 
bles. Very well, but what makes them, and what breaks 
them? What bursts the old wine-skins? What makes 
the seed bear thirty-fold? Jesus believes in that fierce, 
strenuous, wild, discordant, adventurous creature, life. 
"Fear not, little flock," he says, "it is your Father's good 
pleasure to give you the kingdom" (Luke 12:32). But 
there is more than a hint, in another saying, that you 
must be "violent," as the Authorized Version renders it, 
a man of drastic mind and forceful action, if you want to 
capture it and hold it. "The truth shall make you free" — 
dreadfully free! And when he has linked the Kingdom 
of God with all this upheaval, he is represented as saying 
to us: "My peace I give unto you," and: "Ye shall find 
rest unto your souls." Is he contradicting himself? That 
he is right is the verdict of the type that Jesus loves ; it 
is to be the life of adventure in a new world, the life of 
intellectual battle and spiritual peace, and none better. It 
all comes from his central belief in God, God the author 
of life, creative, insurgent, upheaving life, and God the 
lover of it. 

He is in vivid contrast with the world in which he found 
himself. The stricter Stoics of that day practically elim- 
inated God from the world; to the vulgar they left their 
own religions as good enough for them, so drawing a fatal 
distinction between truth and religion. The adherents 
of the mysteries, on the other hand, would not have ques- 
tions, as we saw, because questions upset faith and strike 
at the root of religion ; they would have men stick to what 
they were told, hold to what they do not know, to what 
they do not understand, to the irrational, to the unex- 
amined life, to dreams and visions and mystery. 

What a contrast Jesus is to the Church today, with its 
lethargy, with its fear of new ideas, its clinging to auth- 



FREEDOM AND RELIGION 239 

ority and the conventional, its mistrust of argument, and 
of spiritual appeal! Men have learned to count many of 
these things as the characteristics of the Church of 
Christ, as if they were not essential unbelief and atheism. 
But all that is foreign to the historic Jesus, utterly 
repugnant to the very heart of him, as to every man who 
really believes in truth. No, the real difficulty has not 
been in Jesus; it has been in ourselves. We have been 
reluctant to take Jesus seriously; we have not believed 
that he means what he says, we have labelled it paradox, 
and dismissed it as if that settled the question. We have 
not been willing to believe that Jesus and truth will pre- 
vail, to believe with him that truth is a living thing that 
looks after itself, because it belongs to God, because it is 
one with God and shares his vitality. We have been 
afraid to believe that the Christian Gospel is a thing of 
God, and that it has his life and his power of giving life 
and transmitting it. 

II 

But there is another side to the story ; for the Church 
of Jesus has been again and again the champion and the 
exponent of freedom of mind. Paul said : "I will sing in 
the spirit, but I will sing with the understanding also." 
Understanding was one of the marks of the early Church, 
and the awakening of the intellectual life. Lucian, the 
great satirist of the second century, has a story about a 
false prophet called Alexander, who ran a shrine at 
Abonoteichos in Asia Minor, and made a good deal of 
money out of it. At a certain stage in the holy rites in 
his temple, there was a proclamation: "Epicureans out- 
side! Christians outside!" The god was good enough for 
the heathen; but the Christian was not to be taken in 
with a big snake with a mask tied to it; he would see 
the string. That is the evidence of a heathen, and the 



240 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

story seems to me characteristic of the early Church; 
it shows the quickened mind and the new independence. 
Beggars and tramps and strolling prophets, as we have 
seen, 8 infested that Church; but The Teaching of the 
Apostles shows how soon the Christian brought sense to 
bear on new economic questions. "You will have sense," 
writes the author. The Christian martyr, again, like the 
passive resister and the conscientious objector of today, 
had the independence of mind to choose to do his own 
thinking and not to accept blindfold the opinions dic- 
tated by the government of the day. Christians carried 
that determination to think for themselves to the amphi- 
theatre, and the leopard, to the stake where they were 
burned alive — not one, nor two of them, but dozens — a 
course which involved some clearness and independence, 
and they achieved it. 

We may further note, when we turn to the ordinary 
everyday life of those first two centuries, that the Gospel 
spread to higher and higher levels of society. It was, 
partly, because the people who became Christians got into 
the habit of handling fact, as John Wesley's converts 
round Bristol left off being dirty, drunken, and stupid, 
when the Gospel came to them, and became clean and 
quick of mind and enterprising, and then found them- 
selves well-to-do without expecting it, or, in the first 
instance, of seeking it. The Gospel also captured think- 
ing people ; and one of the features of the second century 
is that the Church has more and more of the better minds. 
There was more and more theology, and more and more 
heresy, which meant that people were thinking, if "not 
always with the clearness of Jesus, and sometimes too 
much under the influence of their non-Christian training. 
The heathen temple was almost always a small place, as 
it still is, and the Christian church a large one; for the 

6 Chapter IX, p. 166; Chapter XIII, p. 229. 



FREEDOM AND RELIGION 241 

temple was a place at Which rites were performed, the 
Christian church a place where people were taught, and 
regularly came to learn to think. That is written all 
through the early Church, and it is written in India 
today, though, of course, the early Church had neither 
the money nor the freedom to build. 

As evidence of activity of mind and of sneer originality 
in the religious life, we may take the Epistle to the 
Hebrews. The writer is a man who attempts a new experi- 
ment in religion, who does a new thing all against the 
world's religious experience. The synagogue had indeed 
tentatively led the way, as we have seen, dropping ritual 
for the Torah; but this man goes further. It is hard to 
realize today what a pioneer in thought he was, when he 
tried the experiment of a religion without priest, altar, 
sacrament, or sacrifice, without the Torah, "outside the 
camp," outside Israel, and gave up all except Jesus and 
the presence of God. The Christian was an innovator, a 
revolutionary in thought, in those early days, and he was 
generally right. One of the most striking things is how 
fundamentally wrong all the thinkers outside the Chris- 
tian Church had been on monotheism. None of them 
believed that ordinary people could take in the idea of 
one God only, or would be content with it, if they did 
take it in. That was axiomatic even with the Stoic. The 
history of Christendom and of Islam has shown exactly 
the opposite, and has proved that, for a religion to live 
and to be passionate, it must have one God only. So far 
from being an idea impossible to take in, it is the idea 
that the common man has realized again and again; and 
it has been with him a driving force, a passion, and a 
source of power. In war, empire, and commerce, no 
less than in learning and thought, the monotheist has 
triumphed over the polytheist. It means surely that his 
religion has given him something real. Judaism was 



242 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

monotheistic, but it was a sect; the Christian Church 
was universal, and its monotheism conquered the 
world. 

One of the greatest teachers of the early Church, 
Clement of Alexandria, maintained the cause of Greek 
culture against the "simple Christian." The simple 
Christian insisted that faith alone is needed; "only 
believe," was his regular quotation. Clement has not 
quite our modern word; he calls them "orthodoxasts." 
Against these old-style believers, he defends the Chris- 
tian's right to the utmost of learning that man can have. 
If the Law was the schoolmaster that led Israel to Christ, 
the schoolmaster of Greece was philosophy; and both 
were given by God. How can the Christian but have the 
right to study philosophy? Who has a better right? This 
freedom is the mark of the school of Jesus. Wilamowitz- 
Moellendorf goes so far as to say that "Christianity over- 
came the competing religions of the East, because it Hel- 
lenized itself more thoroughly than they did." 9 By "Hel- 
lenizing itself," he means that Christians achieved, more 
than the adherents of any other cults, that habit of clear 
thinking which is preeminently Greek. This is true; 
Jesus pointed that way by word and example. It is a 
curiously interesting indication of the affinity of (clear 
thinkers everywhere, a reminder (not unneeded today) 
that Jesus was more than a Galilaean peasant at the 
apocalyptic point of view. The Christian Church may 
have come from the East; but it was less Eastern than 
the mystery religions. Indeed the scholar Titius holds 
that the Hellenized categories, to which Paul made the 
transition possible, express the real meaning of Jesus 
better than the apocalyptic forms, which he had himself 
to use. 7 



*Gr. Lit. Gesch, 135. 

7 1 owe this to Dr. D. S. Cairns. 



FREEDOM AND RELIGION 243 

III 

To pass on to the age of the Reformation: out of the 
Renaissance comes a German scholar, Martin Luther. 
Whatever our attitude to some present-day Germans, we 
must not forget our debt to Germany four centuries ago, 
and often since, or we shall think untruly, without bal- 
ance and without perspective. What a battle there has 
been about the Scripture in our own day, we know very 
well. Luther, like other men reborn in that new age, 
read the Scripture with new eyes. Here are some of his 
conclusions. He denied the Mosaic authorship of part of 
the Pentateuch ; he said that Job was an allegory and not 
history; he called the book of Jonah childish; he main- 
tained that the book of Kings was a thousand paces ahead 
of Chronicles ; and that the Epistle of James is an "epis- 
tle of straw"; and of the author of Ecclesiastes he said 
that "he has neither boots nor spurs, but rides in his 
socks." In his day the interpretation of Scripture was 
still conducted by the allegoric method; it was a matter 
of hunting for types and cryptic prophecies. Isaac on 
the altar was a type of Christ ; so were the 318 servants 
of Abraham. Cyprian, in the third century, had laid 
down that wherever wine is mentioned in the Old Testa- 
ment, it is a prophecy of the eucharist, and wherever 
water, of baptism. Luther rejects all these ingenuities 
as "merely ridiculous and childish fopperies; yea, it is 
an apish work in such sort to juggle with Holy Scrip- 
ture;" 8 with which we shall agree. The man is here as 
modern as he can be. 

He studied Greek: and a new epoch in European 
thought began, when he learned that the Greek word 
Metanoein means "to think again," and not, as the Latin 



8 Table-Talk, Ch. 59 (the 17th century translation). 



244 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

said, "to do penance/" He studied church history; and, 
in the words of Principal Lindsay, he was "half exultant 
and half terrified at the result of his studies." The 
power of the Pope rested on sham history and bogus 
documents — on the forged Decretals and on the forged 
Donation of Constantine. Other scholars had led the way 
here ; but when Luther saw that they were right, scholar- 
ship was translated into action, and into history. 
"Luther's speeches at Leipzig," says Dr. Lindsay, "laid 
the foundation of that modern historical criticism of in- 
stitutions which has gone so far in our days." 10 Yes, and 
more; the man had entered into the freedom of Christ; 
he was not afraid of fact; he learnt, he thought, and he 
saw the relevance of the facts ; and he acted with the free- 
dom that Jesus had given him. He re-examined the 
question of vows and of celibacy ; and then he married his 
Katharine, and had his little John, and he learned the 
beauty and delight and difficulty of family life. He loved 
singing and laughter, and little children; and he wrote 
Christmas carols, and translated the Bible. The contri- 
bution of Bible translation to freedom of thought and 
education we have already discussed. 11 

Luther struck, as the missionaries today are striking, 
a blow for freedom of mind, for the sweeping away of all 
superstition, by putting the Bible in the hands of com- 
mon people and bringing the historical Jesus face to 
face with them. How directly Luther approaches the 
real! Men talked about visions of angels and of saints. 
Luther anticipated modern psychologists in suspecting 
such things. Luther said: "If it were in my choice, I 
would not wish God to appear to me or to speak to me 



9 Chapter V. It is an illuminating contrast that Loyola, after trying 
Erasmus' Greek Testament, refused to read it, because it interfered with 
"his devotional emotions." Cf. Froude, Erasmus, p. 130. 

19 T. M. Lindsay, Reformation, I, pp. 235, 239. 

11 Chapter XII, Chapter XIII, pp. 206, 228. See A. V. G. Allen, Con- 
tinuity of Christian Faith, p. 275. 



FREEDOM AND RELIGION 245 

from heaven." No, he would "hold by His common revela- 
tion to all men in the words and works of Christ."" He 
was for no private property in revelation, no spiritual 
aristocracy. And further, "No man," he said, "must be 
coerced in spiritual matters." That is the voice of free- 
dom. It is a pity that we do not hear more of it. The 
emphasis laid by the religious today on authority and 
tradition does not point to freedom. The claim to the 
right of private judgment and the great doctrines of 
justification by faith and the priesthood of all believers 
meant (and still mean) the right of the individual con- 
science, and its duty, to seek, to find, and to hold truth as 
it is enabled by God — the widest of all charters of liberty. 

Behind it all is Luther's conviction of the value, the 
meaning and force of the crucified Jesus. 13 The Chris- 
tian religion is based on fact, not fancy, nor even dogma. 
It begins with Jesus, working, living, suffering; and the 
condition of its progress is never to get far away from 
the pierced hands and the crown of thorns. The whole 
Reformation movement was an attempt to get nearer to 
the mind of Jesus. Monasticism, sacraments, tradition, 
the Church — did they bring men nearer to that mind? 
That was the test. Positively, the emphasis fell on God 
in Christ, on the individual soul, on righteousness as 
illuminated and given by Christ. Out of this new appeal 
to Jesus came a new world, a new era, a new England. 
Out of it, or from nowhere, will come the world we want 
to see. We cannot dispense with the historical Jesus 
yet; he is our best safeguard against wild thinking, 
fancy, theosophy, polytheism, superstition, as he is 
against rigidity, dullness, officialism, and oppression — ; 
against Zeitgeist in every form. 

There is much cant today about the divisions of Chris- 
tendom, but it is still true, as Milton said, that "under 

18 See Herrmann, Communion of Christians with God, pp. 187, 188. 
"See Chapter IV; Chapter VI. 



246 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

the fantastic terrors of sect and religion, we wrong the 
earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and under- 
standing which God hath stirred up." 14 We must unlearn 
some of our talk about "unhappy divisions." Divisions 
are only unhappy when tempers are sharp and awkward ; 
otherwise, they may be very profitable, and very happy. 
The alternative may be spiritual death, as history has 
witnessed before now. Public opinion does not neces- 
sarily mean freedom, it may be the death of liberty, and 
only the spirit of Jesus can revive it. 



IV 



In the nineteenth century the Church had a great 
struggle about geology and Genesis. But there were 
people who saw that the Church of Christ was based on 
something better than Moses* knowledge of the rocks — 
on quite another kind of Rock. Jesus himself had con- 
demned Moses as an opportunist for his compromise on 
marriage. If Moses was wrong on divorce, why should 
he be right about geology? Which is the worse error? 
After that came the higher criticism; and again there 
were people who saw that we rest on the living Jesus* 
historical land present, and who found it possible, like 
the earliest Christians, who had not yet a New Testa- 
ment, to love and enjoy Jesus and have life in him. Think 
of the incalculable gain that followed, the freedom of 
mind won for Christian thinkers, the right to believe in 
a real Jesus without sacrifice of intellectual honesty. 
Through difficulty and pain they found a way out, and 
they brought us into freedom. If today we do not trouble 
about geology or higher criticism, and it is rather the 



14 Cf. Phillips Brooks, Light of the World, p. 85. In the Puritan cen- 
tury, "everything was probed to the bottom, all delegated authorities were 
questioned. ... It never frightened the Puritan when you bade him 
stand still and listen to the speech of God." 



FREEDOM AND RELIGION 247 

problems of psychology in connection with religion that 
perplex us, we surely need not be afraid. Or, again, if 
we are told that economic science clashes with what Jesus 
said of economics, we shall go and see what Jesus did 
say; and perhaps, like the writer of The Teaching of the 
Apostles, we shall get some inkling of what he would 
say, if he were living in a different order of society from 
that of the Roman Empire. The very last thing we 
should find would be any insistence on his part that 
change was wrong. Mohammed fixed Moslem chronology 
irrevocably and disastrously on the basis of an erroneous 
astronomy, current in his day; and in that there is an 
illuminating contrast with the historical Jesus. Where 
the spirit of Jesus is, there will be liberty and with it a 
new spirit of joy and of freedom. We do not go into the 
intellectual problems of our day tied and bound, because 
Jesus set us free; we know whose we are and whom we 
serve ; we know the type of mind that he loved, the type 
of mind that he gave; and Jesus will be for us, as for 
those before us, the Author of Freedom. 

But surely we have to go further. The Christian life 
is not to be conceived as a long struggle of accommoda- 
tion with the discoveries which men of science and 
scholarship make of God's laws in the world around us 
and of God's doings in the past. The follower of Jesus 
is called to be a pioneer himself; and it is a common 
experience that one great feature of the Christian life is 
the constant feeling that there is more beyond. There 
is something of the infinite in Jesus; and, as one feels 
•with every real aspect of nature, we are never done 
learning. I have gained more here from the poet 
Wordsworth than from anybody. The poet seems a man 
with no very symmetrical system of the universe, and 
for this reason, he would tell us, that he is always being 
surprised by what he thought he knew. Common peo- 



248 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

pie know such lots of things ; he knows the waterfall, he 
knows the daffodil and the celandine, and knows them 
intimately. "Yes/' he says, "and then one day the daffodil 
spoke a new language and said strange things, that I 
had never heard it say before ; so then I knew that I did 
not know even it." That is what the poets teach us 
about the real; and there is the same quality in Jesus — 
the genius for surprising even his intimates with fresh 
wonder. He brings all God's infinite into our business 
and bosom. With him we feel that nothing real is alien, 
that all is human, and everything is at home with him. 
Christians have hesitated about thought, and not been 
sure of art ; and, as a result, the philosopher is not always 
friendly to the Christian, and the artist still less; but 
they would have been at home with our Master. Jesus 
gives a "worth-while-ness" to everything. "Your labor is 
not in vain in the Lord," Paul says. The labor of poet, 
artist, and thinker is to bring truth and beauty into life, 
to capture the unrealized. Carlyle said that "all labor is 
an appeal from the seen to the unseen." Jesus stands 
for the larger life; he is come that we might range fur- 
ther into the unseen, into regions yet untrod — that we 
"might have life and have it more abundantly," or in mod- 
ern speech, "more overflowing vitality." Jesus means 
exploration of God, the bracing of all the soul's energies 
and their development for that splendid task. Thought 
is a primary Christian duty; every Christian's duty and 
opportunity. How is God to be reached without thought? 
or Jesus to be understood? 

The very existence of Jesus has been to humanity one 
of the greatest stimulants to thoughts; and thus one of 
the great factors in developing the human mind. His 
personality has been the most baffling problem with 
which men have had to wrestle; it is the key to any true 
intelligence of human nature. Historically, one of the 



FREEDOM AND RELIGION 249 

marks of the early Church was that, though it did not 
come from the upper ranks of society and had not the 
highest culture, it out-thought the ancient world all 
along the line. The man who tries to explain Jesus will 
come out of the attempt a greater man than ever he went 
in, if he works with any depth and seriousness. It is 
hard even yet to predict a date for the achievement of 
the task. One may study Christology, and not be much 
better, but the intimate knowledge of Jesus is an eman- 
cipating force, and the effect of consorting with him is 
to enlarge the whole nature — sympathy, intelligence, 
every faculty — in short to develop a man to his utmost 
and to transcend that utmost. The cross remains a chal- 
lenge to every generation. It raises all the questions as 
to pain and death, it brings us face to face with the 
necessity of rethinking God. A man awakened to one 
set of interests is more apt to understand another, and 
there is no end to the activity of growing intelligence. 
The redeemed man is always ahead of what he was 
before, and the more fully he is remade by Jesus Christ 
the more he goes ahead. "Conquering and to conquer" 
is a true description of the Christian soldier as well as of 
his Leader. He gets the instinct and the inspiration for 
growth and progress from Jesus; and the new man and 
the new ideas gravitate to one another. As Dr. Dale 
said, "The healthier and nobler forces of the Renaissance 
found their natural home and received religious sanction 
in Protestantism" — the religion of the rediscovered 
Jesus. 

V 

One or two questions remain. There is little about 
art in the gospels. One might even say that there is no 
indication there that Jesus cared about art; though per- 
haps it would be truer to say that the people with whom 



250 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

he worked did not. We have to remember the background 
of Judaism with its hereditary hostility to the paganism 
of Greek art. His disciples, indeed, were impressed by 
the Temple, which was a new one and not of the best 
period; and it may not have been the highest art that 
the artists embodied in the stones and the votive offer- 
ings which the Galilaean peasants admired. But there is 
a better way of approaching the matter. Let us look at 
the words of Jesus. Think how that man tells a story; 
he sees and fells, like a poet; and can we say that art is 
alien to him? that the creative spirit, which is the soul 
of art, is alien to Jesus, when he can create, as he does, 
in the sphere of language? when he taught mankind a 
new habit of language altogether? He feels deeply, and 
his speech is alive at once with imagination; and that 
comes very near the artist's temperament. Jesus is much 
more natural" in his speech than most men, simpler and 
deeper, and that is partly why he baffles the literalists so 
badly ; it takes a poet to understand him. 19 The greatest 
English poet of the last two hundred years is Words- 
worth, and he is the man who used the plainest language, 
who linked the most commonplace words and the most 
original thought, as Euripides did in Greece. Jesus has 
the same gift in "touching the common/' till the bush in 
his story is aflame with God, more than in the legend of 
Moses, till the bird in the bush is a source of joy to 
God, till the flowers on the tree and on the ground beside 
it become an expression of God's own sense of beauty. 17 
I can quite believe that the great artists, when they 
really see him, move past us, and And themselves at home 



15 «A rt j g p er f ec t when it seems to be nature," said Longinus, ch. 22. 

19 "Not infrequently the first native contributions to a Christian liter- 
ature take the form of hymns." — World's Missionary Conference, 1910, 
Report, vol. II, p. 124. 

"A very remarkable expression in the Wisdom of Solomon (13,3) is 
worth recalling here. The writer speaks of fire, wind, swift air, circling 
stars, raging water, luminaries of heaven; "for the first Author of 
beauty created them." 



FREEDOM AND RELIGION 251 

with him. He, like them, goes beyond us in his intuitions 
of God's sense of color and form. 

The function of art is the enjoyment and the interpre- 
tation of the whole of God's infinite life in its whole com- 
plex of relations. Who has interpreted God and God's 
real more gloriously than Jesus? Who has given men 
more right to enjoy God's gift of beauty, or done more 
to develop the faculty of joy which is the means of 
apprehending it? Who has given us the warrant to 
believe that "man's chief end is to glorify God and to 
enjoy him for ever"? Art, if it is to achieve its supreme 
work, in the union of form and freedom, implies the 
intensely individual mind at work on the facts of God; 
and in religion, as Jesus taught it, law and liberty in 
unison are the outstanding features, God and the human 
soul busy with each other and in harmony. Dr. For- 
syth's fine book, Christ upon Parnassus, deals with this 
subject. Christianity, he says, in giving to the individual 
infinite value, opened a new and infinite field to art, the 
field of expression and characteristic, in passion, senti- 
ment, and affection. The story of the Church is not 
without significance in the history of art. As men gain 
surer glimpses of the real in Jesus, there are new fields 
of art for us. The best interpreter, surely, will be the 
great Author of love. Love is the key to art. Goethe 
said about Heine, that he had many great gifts, but he 
failed for want of love. Jesus, on the contrary, it has 
been said, liberated in the world an endless force of love. 
In lowlier language, he had the gift of appreciation, and 
he communicates it. He teaches men to see the wonder- 
ful and the beautiful in others, to see and to love the 
beautiful in nature, and to go on so doing till all God's 
infinite world is their own. Is that alien to art? 

A gap frequently felt in the systems of theologians 
is due to their failure to allow a place in religion for 



252 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN 

humor. Have we ever fully availed ourselves of the 
playfulness of Jesus' speech? When he told his fol- 
lowers that if a man hits them on one cheek, they must 
turn the other, did he not know they would laugh — he, 
who grew up in the market-place of Nazareth? When he 
said that the distinction between Jew and Gentile was 
that the Gentile was always asking, "What shall we eat 
and what shall we drink?" was there no play of humor 
in that? When he spoke about swallowing a camel, was 
there no gleam of playfulness there? I do not believe 
that the phrase of Jesus there was just current coin. 
At any rate, the people of the day did not take it so, and 
I think they would have known their own common phrases, 
and would hardly have troubled to record them. They 
remembered his ways of speech, because in his playful- 
ness and charm there was something individual and orig- 
inal. We are told that the fount of humor is a loving 
heart, that sees the incongruity, and smiles and sighs at 
the same time. John Bunyan expressed it exactly, when 
he said: 

"Some things are of that nature as to make 
One's fancy checkle while his heart doth ache." 

Bunyan's humor had provoked criticism of his Pilgrim, 
as he tells us in a later preface: 

"And some there be who say he laughs too loud." 

There are always people like that in the Church — 
dear, earnest, useful people, and so dull; but, when the 
Kingdom of Heaven comes, everybody will have sense of 
humor, and in every case it will be a gift from the same 
Giver. "A real sense of humor," wrote Rendel Harris, 
"breaks into flower when we have overcome the world."" 



" Cf. Mr. Cluttoa Brock's remark that "Christianity has lost its power 
of laughter, because it has been merely on the defensive." "The uni- 
verse," says another, "means well, when there are such exquisitely funny 
things in it." 



FREEDOM AND RELIGION 253 

And who is he that overcometh the world? It is matter- 
of-fact that kills art and kills humor; and it is Jesus, 
who gets people out of matter-of-fact, and gives the spirit 
of the new life, to which all these things are real and 
living, who gives the artist subjects and gives him free- 
dom, gives him love and humor and happiness, sensitive- 
ness to the questions and suggestions of Nature, and the 
enjoyment of God. 

The great thing that Jesus has done, the center of all, 
has been to enlarge man's capacity for God. That is the 
secret of it. The ideas of little children are very lim- 
ited. They are not always very ready to recognize the 
claims of "gutter children" or outsiders. The story of 
home life is the story of the growth of the child and the 
training of his capacity for taking the whole world into 
his heart ; and Jesus has done that with men and women, 
who are harder to teach than little children. Jesus has, 
indeed, given the human heart the capacity for God. 
God is comprehended in how many ways, along the line 
of every faculty, and of every sensitiveness ? God speaks 
to one man in color, to another in sound, to another in 
movement, to another in rhy chm, to another in the beauty 
of children, to another in the need of the world. Jesus 
all through the centuries has been making the human 
heart larger, and more human, and more apt to get hold 
of God and then to want more of him. He has been, of 
all beings, the most intelligent of God, the most sympa- 
thetic with all God's creatures, the great interpreter, not 
only of God, but of everything in which God is interested, 
the bird on the wing, the flower in the fieid. Where the 
spirit of the Lord Jesus is, there is liberty. 



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